![]() One painting to result from this journey was Jerusalem (1870), considered one of his better later works. Questioning his own ideal of the union of science, religion, nature, and art, he appeared to be turning to the Holy Land for answers. After the Civil War Church continued to travel and sketch, visiting Jamaica in 1865 and Europe and the Middle East in 1867-1869. But perhaps there was no grand design in nature, and his confident, optimistic renderings of nature came to seem out of place as times changed. He saw his art was a means of bringing mankind into harmony with God ’s universe. For the Transcendentalist-influenced Church, nature was the theater of man ’s mystic regeneration, a phenomenon of providential design. The implications of Darwin, and of the accumulation of scientific knowledge in general, seemed to provoke in Church a crisis of spirit. The year that Church displayed Heart of ’the Andes was also when Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species. During this period Church produced signature pieces such as Twilight in the Wilderness (1860), The Icebergs (1861), and Cotopaxi (1862).Ĭrisis of Spirit. ![]() The first painting from these sketches was Heart of the Andes (1859), regarded by many as his masterpiece. In spring of that year he returned to South America, this time staying in Ecuador. Niagara, first displayed at the National Academy in 1857, captured the grandeur of the falls as no other painting had before and was seen by thousands in American and England. The first finished work based on these sketches, La Magdalena (1854), appeared at the National Academy of Design in spring of 1855 and was highly acclaimed, as was View on the Magdalena River (1857). Inspired by Humboldt, Church made his first trip to South America in the spring of 1853, returning to New York with many sketches of the scenery. Around this time he also began reading German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt ’s Cosmos (1845-1862), which led him to produce paintings that combined panoramic vistas with scientifically correct detail, as in his New England Scenery (1851). In 1850 he made his first trip to Maine, whose landscapes were to figure in many of his paintings, such as Beacon, off Mount Desert Island (1851). Church established a studio in New York City in 1847, where he worked in winters painting finished pictures from oil and graphite sketches. This work and others, such as July Sunset (1847), show the influence of Cole but display Church ’s trademark attention to detail and precise rendering of light. Thomas Hooker and Company Journeying through the Wilderness from Plymouth to Hartford, in 1636, is a historical landscape celebrating the founding of his hometown. At age nineteen Church began exhibiting works at the National Academy of Design. ![]() From Cole he derived much of his philosophy of landscape painting, especially the notion that the artist ’s role was to express not only the physical aspect of the external world but also observations about the human condition. In 1844 he became the first pupil accepted by Thomas Cole, the artist considered to be most representative of the Hudson River School. Born on in Hartford, Connecticut, to Joseph Church, a prominent and wealthy businessman, and Eliza Janes Church, Frederic studied art briefly in Hartford and displayed considerable ability. But in the genre of landscape painting Frederic Church became its most famous and admired exponent.Įarly Years. ![]() In the 1870s the landscapes of Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran brought the grandeur of the American West into the popular imagination. Several of these landscape painters came to be known collectively as the Hudson River School. During the middle decades of the nineteenth century there emerged a group of American painters influenced by the currents of European Romanticism and inspired by the natural grandeur of their homeland. ![]()
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