Sarah Joslyn paid for this building, which opened as a memorial on November 29, 1931, designed in the Art Deco manner by the father and son John and Alan McDonald. Norman Foster's Suzanne and Walter Scott Pavilion was added in 1994, and in September 2024 the museum reopened with the Rhonda and Howard Hawks Pavilion by Snøhetta. General admission has been free since 2013.
The collection that belongs most to this river is Karl Bodmer's. The young Swiss painter traveled from 1832 to 1834 with the naturalist Prince Maximilian of Wied, and in April 1833 they started up the Missouri by steamboat and keelboat. They reached Fort McKenzie near present Great Falls in August, turned back a month later, and wintered at Fort Clark near the Mandan and Hidatsa towns, where Bodmer drew people in their lodges over months. On the way up he painted the Bellevue agency of Major Dougherty, a few miles south of what is now downtown Omaha.
His nearly four hundred watercolors and sketches disappeared into the Wied family archives after Maximilian's death and surfaced after the Second World War. Northern Natural Gas of Omaha bought the collection in 1962, and its successor, Enron, gave it to the Joslyn in 1986. Many of the sheets, the Bellevue view among them, are not on view at any given time; the 81 aquatints made from them for Maximilian's book of 1839 show the same people and places in print.
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