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7th
8thAnniversary
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Form &
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The Folk
olk Art
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off Jerry
J
and
d
Susan Lauren
Celebrating
America
on Canvas
Frederic Church
Edward
A N CAN Potthast
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The Fourteenth
Street School
Americans Abroad
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W
hen, in 1855, Frederic Edwin Church began
to exhibit his paintings of the South American landscape, based on
his first voyage there two years earlier, he was quickly recognized as
America’s greatest landscape painter, heir to that identification
achieved by his teacher, Thomas Cole. Church’s reputation was
enhanced when several of his works achieved critical recognition in
London and the approval of John Ruskin, who admired Church’s
great 1857 canvas, Niagara (Fig. 1). Church retained his
supremacy in American landscape painting until he settled in 1872
into Olana, his ornate home outside of Hudson, New York, on
which construction had begun in 1870. For the first few following
years, Church continued to produce masterworks, but by the late
1870s, his few major pictures, such as El Rio de Luz (Fig. 2) distinctly suggest a composite memory image, as do a series of smaller
The Worlds
of Frederic
Edwin Church
by William Gerdts
paintings of the 1880s. His last significant picture, The Icebergs
(Fig. 3), is a small, somber reminiscence of his great The Icebergs
(Fig. 4) painted three decades earlier. Church’s retreat from the
country’s art scene corresponded to the public’s preference for the
French-derived Barbizon aesthetic of more generalized and poetic
landscapes over the carefully defined, expansive interpretation that
Fig. 1: Frederic Edwin Church (American, 1826–1900), Niagara, 1857.
Oil on canvas, 41˙ x 90˙ inches. Courtesy of Corcoran Gallery of Art,
Washington, D.C. Museum purchase, Gallery Fund. 76.15.
identified the Hudson River School, of which Church was one of
the last, and surely the greatest master.
By the time Church died in 1900, he had been all but forgotten,
and while The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York mounted a
small show of his paintings less than two months after his death,
Church’s great pictures were to go unappreciated for many decades.
Church’s reputation was revived in the 1960s, first by the general
appreciation of mid-nineteenth century American painting that
resulted from the formation and publication of the M. and M. Karolik
collection of American paintings by the
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and, more
specifically, through the efforts of the late art
historian David C. Huntington, who completed his dissertation on Church at Yale
University in 1966 and subsequently became
instrumental in the renovation of Olana, now a
center for Church study and scholarship.1 At
that time, Church was esteemed primarily for
Niagara and his South American landscapes of
the later 1850s and early ‘60s. More recently,
recognition has been awarded to the North
American landscapes, both those painted
immediately following his study with Cole,
such as New England Landscape with Ruined
Chimney (Fig. 5), painted in 1846, which
repeats his teacher’s concern for the passage of
time and even adopts the oval format of a
number of Cole’s domestic scenes of the 1840s,
and more mature works of the early 1850s.
Fig. 2: Frederic Edwin Church (American,
1826–1900), El Rio de Luz (The River of Light),
1877. Oil on canvas. 54˚ x 84Δ inches.
Courtesy of National Gallery of Art, Washington,
D.C. Gift of the Avalon Foundation 1965.14.1.
Church’s early American pictures partake of
the nationalism that was rampant in the midnineteenth century, as evident among the
landscape painters — Church included —
who later became known as the “Hudson River
School” (originally a term of disparagement
coined when the works had gone out of favor).
In the late 1840s and the early ‘50s, this
Connecticut-born painter kept very much to
New England, creating an amalgam of his
visual experiences on canvases that reflect the
optimistic belief in the harmony of man with
nature in pre-Civil War America. By 1852,
however, Church was determined to travel to
South America, inspired by the writings of the
scientist, naturalist, and travel writer Alexander
von Humboldt, who challenged landscape
painters to depict the incredible variety of
scenic beauty that he had discovered in his
travels there between 1794 and 1799.
This became Church’s mandate. Though not
the first American artist to travel to South
America — the Boston portraitist John Greenwood had gone to Surinam in 1752, and in
1845, New York landscape painter Jacob Ward
traveled extensively through the region2 —
Church’s excursion there can be seen as a further extolling of the romantic ideal of a pastoral
New World, this one even less contaminated by
European “civilization” than his own country.
Church and his friend Cyrus Field left New
York in April 1853 and traveled to Colombia,
arriving at the mouth the Magdalena River. His
letters home address the interesting nature of
the villages through which he passed and the
THIS PAGE, TOP TO BOTTOM:
Fig. 4: Frederic Edwin Church (American,
1826–1900), The Icebergs 1861.
Oil on canvas, 64˙ x 112˙ inches.
Courtesy of Dallas Museum of Art. Anonymous gift.
Fig. 3: Frederic Edwin Church (American,
1826–1900), The Iceberg, 1891.
Oil on canvas, 20 x 30 inches. Courtesy of
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA. 72.2.3.
natural scenery that he was sketching, and upon
which he drew for later pictures such as the several versions of his View on the Magdalena
River (Fig. 6), in which he introduces the single
palm tree, his most consistent trope in his
South American landscapes.
Church and Field next visited Bogota, but
their goal was Quito, Ecuador, which they
reached on August 30, 1853. The high volcanic
Andean peaks to the north and south of the
capital became the basis for Church’s most celebrated South American landscapes. Cotopaxi,
the mountain singled out by Humboldt as the
highest, most beautiful, and also most dangerous, particularly figured in Church’s
repertory when, back in New York, he began
developing his South American sketches into
finished paintings in 1855. In Cotopaxi (Fig.
7), the volcano, still active but benign, towers
over the tropical landscape. In these paintings
Church presents a “new” New World, one
which stretches from the tropics to snowcapped peaks, and sees nature in harmony with
itself, the figures, and occasional buildings,
shrines and cross-shaped grave markers. But
Church reached his first pinnacle of fame with
his large and sublime The Andes of Ecuador
(Fig. 8), here concentrating not on a single
Andean peak — though Cotopaxi and
Cayambe are among those shown — but on
the combination of vastness and variety of an
almost other-worldly nature.
Church made a second visit to South
America in 1857, this time only to Ecuador,
accompanied by his fellow landscape painter,
and sometime emulator, Louis Remy Mignot.
On this trip, Church concentrated especially on
oil studies of Chimborazo, which he later
worked up in his studio in the new Tenth Street
Studio Building in New York. Church was one
of its first tenants, and it was in the large gallery
there that his most celebrated South American
masterwork, The Heart of the Andes (Fig. 9) was
viewed by an ecstatic public.
South America ceased to be featured in
Church’s oeuvre for the next few years,
returning in the artist’s explosive Cotopaxi
(Fig. 10) related to the smaller oil version,
Eruption of Cotopaxi (Fig. 11). This later
view of Cotopaxi reverses the harmonious natural interplay of his 1850s versions. Not
surprisingly, this richly lit and high-colored yet
barren landscape of opposing natural forces
has been interpreted as reflective of the
turmoil of the Civil War at home.
Church made one more artistically significant trip to Latin, if not South, America,
Fig. 6: Frederic Edwin Church
(American, 1826–1900),
View on the Magdalena River, 1857.
Oil on canvas, 23ƒ x 36 inches.
Private collection.
visiting Jamaica in 1865 while recovering from
the death of four of his children, two of whom
had died in March of that year. The trip
resulted in his vast canvas The Vale of St.
THIS PAGE, TOP TO BOTTOM:
Fig. 5: Frederic Edwin Church
(American, 1826–1900),
New England Landscape with Ruined Chimney, 1846.
Oil on panel, 9© x 13¬ inches. Private collection.
Fig. 9: Frederic Edwin Church
(American, 1826–1900),
The Heart of the Andes, 1859.
Oil on canvas, 66Δ x 119© inches.
Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Bequest of Margaret E. Dows, 1909. 9.95.
Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Thomas, Jamaica (Fig. 12), a jungle scene in
which a violent rain storm at the left seems to
clear the landscape to lay out its beauty and
infinite expanse. In subsequent years, as
Church was drawn more to the Old World,
South America functioned, not as a source of
discovery and inspiration, but of nostalgia,
such as in his Tropical Scenery (Fig. 13),
painted in 1873, many years after his visits to
South America, and lacking either specificity
of form or geological identification. Humanity
has greater presence here, too, than in his earlier tropical scenes, not only in the prominent
foreground figure, but in the small city set on
a distant plateau. A decade later, Church
began almost annual visits to Mexico, but a
serious arthritic condition and general ill
health yielded only some oil sketches.
In the late 1850s, Church’s exploration of
New World territories had also taken him to
Newfoundland and Labrador in the frozen
north, areas that had drawn explorers seeking
the Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the
Pacific. Sir John Franklin’s ill-fated explorations
of 1847 brought the region to public — and
artistic — attention. In mid-1859, in the company of Louis Legrand Noble, Church traveled
from Boston to Halifax and Sydney in Nova
Scotia, and on to St. John’s in Newfoundland,
and then still further north, to the southeastern
tip of Labrador.3 Church painted multiple
studies of icebergs on this voyage for the pow-
erful Icebergs and Wreck in Sunset
(Fig. 14), culminating in his
immense masterwork, The Icebergs
(Fig. 4). Both paintings, devoid of
life except for the remains of
wrecked vessels in the foreground,
relics of a lost expedition, presented
to the public a world previously
unseen and a contrasting pendant
to the tropical glories which had so
firmly established his fame in the
mid-fifties.4 Church had spanned,
south to north, the New World.
After the Civil War, Church
looked to the Old World both for
philosophic and artistic motivation,
and it is difficult not to believe that
he had lost faith in the glory and
promise of the New World. Now
he sought out monuments of past
civilizations, replacing the natural
wonders of the New World. In the
late autumn of 1867, he set out for
the Near East. He and his party settled in Beirut, from where Church
explored the entire region, creating
studies for two of his masterworks
to be completed back in Olana:
Jerusalem from The Mount of
Olives (1870; Nelson-Atkins
Museum of Art, Kansas City,
Missouri) and El Khasné, Petra
(Fig. 15). After an uninspiring
summer in the Bavarian Alps,
Church was in Athens in 1869. He
wrote of “the wonderful ruins of the
Acropolis,” and the revelation of the
Parthenon, which he described as
“certainly the culmination of the
genius of man in architecture.”5 His
studies made at the time (Fig. 16)
Fig. 7: Frederic Edwin Church
(American, 1826–1900),
Cotopaxi, 1855.
Oil on canvas, 30 x 46⁷⁄₁₆ inches.
Courtesy of The Museum of Fine
Arts, Houston. Museum purchase
with funds provided by the
Hogg Brothers Collection, gift
of Miss Ima Hogg, by exchange.
THIS PAGE, TOP TO BOTTOM:
Fig. 10: Frederic Edwin Church (American, 1826–1900), Cotopaxi, 1862. Oil on canvas, 48 x 85 inches.
Courtesy of Detroit Institute of Arts. Founders Society Purchase, Robert H. Tannahill Foundation Fund, Gibbs-Williams Fund, Dexter M. Ferry, Jr., Fund,
Merrill Fund, Beatrice W. Rogers Fund, and Richard A. Manoogian Fund. Photograph © The Detroit Institute of Arts.
Fig. 12: Frederic Edwin Church (American, 1826–1900), Vale of St. Thomas, Jamaica, 1867. Oil on canvas, 48⁵⁄₁₆ x 84¬ inches.
Courtesy of Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Conn. Bequest of Elizabeth Hart Jarvis Colt.
THIS PAGE, TOP TO BOTTOM:
Fig. 11: Frederic Edwin Church (American, 1826–1900), Eruption at Cotopaxi, ca. 1865. Oil on canvas, 9⁹⁄₁₆ x 17¹⁄₁₆ inches. Private collection.
Fig. 13: Frederic Edwin Church (American, 1826–1900), Tropical Scenery, 1873. Oil on canvas, 38¬ x 59⁵⁄₁₆ inches. The Brooklyn Museum, New York. Dick S. Ramsay Fund.
THIS PAGE, TOP TO BOTTOM:
Fig. 8: Frederic Edwin Church (American, 1826–1900), The Andes of Ecuador, 1855. Oil on canvas, 48 x 75 inches. Courtesy of Reynolda House Museum of American Art,
Winston-Salem, NC. Original purchase fund from the Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation, Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, ARCA Foundation, and Anne Cannon Forsyth. 1966.2.9.
Fig. 14: Frederic Edwin Church (American, 1826–1900), Icebergs and Wreck in Sunset, ca. 1860. Oil on paperboard mounted on canvas, 8© x 12© inches. Private Collection.
THIS PAGE, TOP TO BOTTOM:
Fig. 16: Frederic Edwin Church (American, 1826–1900), The Parthenon, ca. 1869–1870. Oil on paper mounted on canvas, 13 x 20 inches. Private Collection.
Fig. 17: Frederic Edwin Church (American, 1826–1900), The Parthenon, 1871. Oil on canvas, 44˙ x 72¬ inches. Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Bequest of Maria De Witt Jesup, from the collection of her husband, Morris K. Jesup, 1914 (15.30.67). Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Fig. 18: Frederic Edwin Church (American,
1826–1900), The Aegean Sea, ca. 1877.
Oil on canvas, 54 x 63© inches.
Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Bequest of Mrs. William H. Osborn, 1902.
Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art
PREVIOUS PAGE:
Fig. 15: Frederic Edwin Church (American,
1826–1900), El Khasné, Petra, 1874.
Oil on canvas, 60© x 50© inches.
Courtesy of Olana State Historic Site, Hudson, NY.
New York State Office of Parks, Recreation,
and Historic Preservation. OL.1981.10.
would lead to his great canvas The Parthenon
(Fig. 17) painted at Olana.
Back in the United States at the end of June
1869, Church’s attention was directed toward
the construction of his fabled home, Olana,
and his traveling days were essentially over. He
continued to produce paintings based upon
his earlier journeys, some South American
views and more Near Eastern ones, though,
perhaps due in part to his increasing arthritic
condition, these have none of the crystalline
quality of his earlier work and often appear to
be composite memory images. Church’s last
great Near Eastern canvas, The Aegean Sea
(Fig. 18), is a composite view based on his
experiences in the Holy Land, Lebanon, Syria,
Greece, and Turkey, and bathed in Turneresque
light, a tribute to the artist whose work he had
become familiar with in London in 1869. In
1877, Church also created his last great South
American image, El Rio de Luz (Fig. 2), again
more a memory image of past experiences.
The two pictures neatly encapsulate the Old
and the New Worlds of Church’s pictorial and
ideological anatomy.
Frederic Edwin Church: Romantic
Landscapes and Seascapes will be on view at
Adelson Galleries in New York from January
18 through March 1, 2008.
William H. Gerdts is professor emeritus
of art history at the Graduate School
of the City University of New York.
1. In addition to his dissertation, see Huntington’s two
publications: Frederic Edwin Church. Exhibition catalogue, (Washington, D.C.: National Collection of Fine
Arts, 1966) ; and The Landscapes of Frederic Edwin
Church: Vision of an American Era (New York: George
Braziller, 1966). The leading Church scholars today are
Franklin Kelly and Gerald L. Carr, the latter, a student
of Huntington’s. See, for instance, Kelly, Frederic Edwin
Church and the National Landscape (Washington, D.C.:
Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988, and Carr, Frederic
Edwin Church: Catalogue Raisonné of Works of Art at
Olana State Historic Site, 2 vols. (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994). Kelly and Carr
jointly wrote The Early Landscapes of Frederic Edwin
Church (Fort Worth, Amon Carter Museum, 1988).
For a full biographical treatment of Church, see John K.
Howat, Frederic Church (New Haven:Yale University
Press, 2005).
2. For American artists in Latin America (including South
and Central America and Mexico), see Katherine Emma
Manthorne, Tropic Renaissance: North American Artists
Exploring Latin America, 1839–1879 (Washington and
London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989).
3. Louis Legrand Noble wrote about his experiences in
After Icebergs with a Painter (New York: D. Appleton and
Company, 1861).
4. The Icebergs has been the subject of two studies: Gerald
L. Carr, Frederic Edwin Church: The Icebergs (Dallas:
Dallas Museum of Art, 1980), and Eleanor Jones
Harvey, The Voyage of the Icebergs: Frederic Church’s Arctic
Masterpiece (Dallas: Dallas Museum of Art, 2002).
5. Church to William H. Osborn, April 14, 1869.
Transcript in Olana State Historic Site.
Frederic Edwin Church
R O M A N T I C
L A N D S C A P E S
A N D
S E A S C A P E S
Syrian Landscape,  Oil on panel  ¼ x  ½ inches (Private Collection)
January  - March , 
Fully illustrated color catalogue with essays by Gerald L. Carr, Ph.D.,
available for  (plus tax and shipping)
from Crawford-Doyle Booksellers () - or [email protected]
Adelson Galleries
 East ⁿd Street New York, NY Mon - Fri :-: Sat -
in association with Michael Altman Fine Art & Advisory Services