Frederic Church
Frederic Church
1826 - 1900
American painter. He was a leading representative of the second generation of the HUDSON RIVER SCHOOL, who made an important contribution to American landscape painting in the 1850s and 1860s. The son of a wealthy and prominent businessman, he studied briefly in Hartford with two local artists, Alexander Hamilton Emmons (1816–84) and Benjamin Hutchins Coe (1799–1883). Thanks to the influence of the Hartford patron DANIEL WADSWORTH, in 1844 he became the first pupil accepted by Thomas Cole. This was an unusual honour, though Cole probably offered little useful technical instruction—he once observed that Church already had ‘the finest eye for drawing in the world’. However, Cole did convey certain deeply held ideas about landscape painting, above all the belief that the artist had a moral duty to address not only the physical reality of the external world but also complex and profound ideas about mankind and the human condition. Church eventually abandoned the overtly allegorical style favoured by his teacher, but he never wavered from his commitment to the creation of meaningful and instructive images.
Church began exhibiting works in New York at the National Academy of Design and American Art-Union while he was still under Cole’s instruction. His first success, the Rev. Thomas Hooker and Company Journeying through the Wilderness from Plymouth to Hartford, in 1636 (1846; Hartford, CT, Wadsworth Atheneum), was a historical landscape that celebrated the founding of his home town. Though the painting was somewhat contrived in composition, and still heavily dependent on Cole, details of foliage, branches and rocks were handled with extraordinary precision, and the radiant, all-encompassing light indicated how carefully the young artist had studied natural phenomena.
After settling in New York in 1847, Church followed a routine of sketching in oil and pencil during summer trips in New York State and New England and painting finished pictures in his studio during the autumn and winter. Most of his works were straightforward American landscapes painted with a crisp realism indicative of his interest in John Ruskin’s aesthetics, but he also exhibited, almost every year until 1851, imaginary or allegorical works reminiscent of Cole with such themes as the Plague of Darkness and The Deluge (both untraced).
In the summer of 1850 Church made his first visit to Maine, beginning a lifelong association with that state. A number of fine marine and coastal pictures resulted, such as Beacon, off Mount Desert Island (1851; priv. col., see 1989–90 exh. cat., p. 26). About this time he started to read the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt’s Cosmos (1845–62), paying particular attention to the chapter on landscape painting and its relationship to modern science. He began to produce compositions that fused panoramic scope with intricate, scientifically correct detail, such as New England Scenery (1851; Springfield, MA, Smith A. Mus.). Although the didactic emphasis of these works recalled Cole’s moralizing landscapes, their strongly nationalistic tone and promise of revelation through scientific knowledge made them especially appealing to Church’s contemporaries.
Humboldt’s description of the tropics of South America as a subject worthy of a great painter inspired Church to travel there in the spring of 1853. He returned to New York with numerous pencil drawings and oil sketches of South American scenery. The first finished pictures based on these studies, such as La Magdalena (1854; New York, N. Acad. Des.), appeared in the spring of 1855 at the National Academy, where they caused a sensation. Even more successful was the Andes of Ecuador (1855; Winston-Salem, NC, Reynolda House), a sweeping view across miles of mountainous landscape animated by a luminous atmosphere.
In 1857 Church unveiled Niagara (1857; Washington, DC, Corcoran Gal. A.), the work that made him the most famous painter in America. This tour de force of illusionistic painting brought the spectator to the very brink of the falls, capturing the effect of North America’s greatest natural wonder as had no previous work. Exhibited by itself in America and England between 1857 and 1859, Niagara was seen and admired by thousands. In the spring of 1857 Church returned to South America to gather material for a new series of major tropical landscapes. The first to appear was his masterpiece, the Heart of the Andes (1859; New York, Met.), which was displayed in the Tenth Street Studio Building in New York in a darkened room with carefully controlled lighting. Surrounded by moulding designed to resemble a window-frame, the painting overwhelmed contemporaries with its intricately painted foreground of tropical plants and its breathtaking vistas along lines leading to several vanishing points in the mountainous distance. Like Niagara, the Heart of the Andes toured cities in the USA and England, receiving enthusiastic critical and popular acclaim.
During the late 1850s and early 1860s Church was at the height of his powers, painting large-scale exhibition pieces, such as Twilight in the Wilderness (1860; Cleveland, OH, Mus. A.), The Icebergs (1861; Dallas, TX, Mus. A.), Cotopaxi (1862; Detroit, MI, Inst. A.) and Aurora Borealis (1865; Washington, DC, N. Mus. of Amer. A.). He continued to paint major works in the years immediately after the Civil War but with an increasing emphasis on visionary atmospheric effects reminiscent of J. M. W. Turner, as in Rainy Season in the Tropics (1866; San Francisco, CA, de Young Mem. Mus.), Niagara Falls, from the American Side (1867; Edinburgh, N.G.) and the Vale of St Thomas, Jamaica (1867; Hartford, CT, Wadsworth Atheneum).
Church continued to travel widely, visiting Jamaica in 1865 and Europe and the Near East in 1867–9 (see fig.). On the journey home, in June 1869, he took advantage of a brief stay in London to study works by Turner. Although a number of important works by Church subsequently appeared in the late 1860s and the 1870s, only a few, such as Jerusalem (1870; Kansas City, MO, Nelson–Atkins Mus. A.), approached the power of his earlier works. Similarly, his late South American scenes gradually became less convincing as his memory of the tropics dimmed. Perhaps his last successful full-scale work was Morning in the Tropics (1877; Washington, DC, N.G.A.), which has a poetic, introspective quality.
Church spent most of the last years of his life at Olana, the house he built on top of a hill overlooking the Hudson River, just across from Catskill, NY. From there he made numerous trips in the last decades of his life, especially to Maine and Mexico. Although few finished works of note date from these years, Church did paint dozens of superb oil sketches, often of the sky seen from Olana. These sketches, now in Olana and the Cooper-Hewitt Museum of Design in New York, are among his most beautiful creations. Olana survives with many of its original furnishings intact. It contains a collection of Church’s works in all media, as well as an important archive of documentary material. [Franklin Kelly. "Church, Frederic Edwin." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 4, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T017654.]
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