Louis Legrand Noble, Thomas Cole’s biographer, to the north Atlantic between Labrador and Greenland to sketch icebergs. Pursuing Humboldt’s global mandate and responding more particularly to the literature of Arctic exploration, in 1859 Church hired a bark to bear him and the Rev. The exhibition of The Heart of the Andes in New York was said to have occasioned Church’s courtship and marriage to Isabel Carnes, in 1860, and the couple settled on a hillside farm overlooking the Hudson River at Hudson, New York. The New York exhibition of his ten-foot canvas, The Heart of the Andes (1859 09.95), housed in an elaborate windowlike frame and illuminated in a darkened room by concealed skylights, was the most popular display of a single artwork in the Civil War era, attracting 12,000 people in three weeks to its New York premiere alone, then traveling to Britain and seven other American cities on a tour lasting two years. On the large and highly wrought paintings that Church executed based on the sketches from those two journeys, he secured his lasting reputation and became, with Albert Bierstadt, the best known and most successful painter of his generation. In 1853, with the young entrepreneur Cyrus Field, Church made the first of two expeditions following Humboldt’s footsteps, chiefly in Colombia the second, in 1857, in company with the landscape painter Louis Remy Mignot, exclusively in Ecuador. In his culminating work, Cosmos (1845), Humboldt implored artists to travel and paint equatorial South America. In 1857, however, Church leapt to nationwide and even international prominence with his seven-foot-wide picture Niagara (Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), which stunned spectators in New York and in Great Britain (where it was shown in 18) with its combination of breadth and uncanny verisimilitude.īy the late 1840s, Church had fallen under the spell of the renowned naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt, whose treatises and travelogues based on his five-year (1799–1804) expedition in the New World were widely translated and read. At one point, the master characterized the student as having “the finest eye for drawing in the world.” Following his term with Cole, Church established a studio in New York City and quickly seized a reputation, less for the allegorical landscapes that had distinguished Cole’s output, than for expansive New York and New England views that synthesized sketches of varying locales into vivid compositions. From 1844 to 1846, Church studied with Cole in his Catskill, New York, studio and accompanied him on sketching sojourns in the Catskill Mountains and the Berkshires of Massachusetts. Born in Hartford in 1826, he was the privileged son of Joseph Church, a jeweler and banker of that city, who interceded with Connecticut scion and collector Daniel Wadsworth to persuade the landscape painter Thomas Cole to accept his son as a pupil. The work reveals the artist’s continued fascination with the panoramic possibilities of the falls and his ongoing search for novel ways to depict the iconic national landmark.Frederic Edwin Church was perhaps the best-known representative of the Hudson River School of landscape painting as well as one its most traveled. Niagara is a highly finished study, executed with great control and detail, including smaller elements such as the wood bridge that leads to the Terrapin Tower. Church uses a palette of light blue, sea foam green, white, and brown with swiftly executed masterful brushstrokes. The rock formations, engulfed in mist, are striking, as is the flow of water cascading over the edge of the falls. In his sweeping panorama, the artist, and by extension the viewer, is positioned in the water, looking up at Horseshoe Falls and the Terrapin Tower, built in 1833 on the brink of the falls. Church painted this exquisite on-site oil study of the Horseshoe Falls section of Niagara Falls, from the Canadian side, most likely during his trip in August, 1858. Having been introduced to the on-sight oil sketch by his teacher Thomas Cole, he would practice it throughout his lifetime, commenting to Cole, "of all employments, I think it most delightful." Church’s close observations of nature, seen in Niagara, represent a challenge to earlier models of landscape art that insisted on symbolic unity, and instead offers a discourse with current scientific knowledge. The nineteenth century was the great age of the plein-air oil sketch and American artist Frederic Church was among the most accomplished and prolific exponents of the medium.
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