2/15/2024 0 Comments Frederic edwin church photographsHis American frontier landscapes show the "expansionist and optimistic outlook of the United States in the mid-nineteenth century." Church did differ from Cole in the topics of his paintings: he preferred natural and often majestic scenes over Cole's propensity towards allegory.Ĭhurch, like most second generation Hudson River School painters, used extraordinary detail, romanticism, and luminism in his paintings. This style attempted to capture the wild realism of an unsettled America that was quickly disappearing, and the feelings of discovery and appreciation for natural beauty. The paintings were characterized by their focus on traditional American pastoral settings, especially the Catskill Mountains, and their romantic qualities. Cole, along with his friend Asher Durand, started this school in New York it was the first well-acknowledged American artistic movement. Both Cole and Church were devout Protestants and the latter's beliefs played a role in his paintings especially his early canvases. The Hudson River School was established by the British Thomas Cole when he moved to America and started painting landscapes, mostly of mountains and other traditional American scenes. Soon after, he sold his first major work to Hartford's Wadsworth Athenaeum.Ĭhurch was the product of the second generation of the Hudson River School and the pupil of Thomas Cole, the school’s founder. In May 1849, Church was elected as the youngest Associate of the National Academy of Design and was promoted to Academician the following year. At eighteen years of age, Church became the pupil of Thomas Cole in Catskill, New York after Daniel Wadsworth, a family neighbor and founder of the Wadsworth Athenaeum, introduced the two. The family's wealth allowed Frederic Church to pursue his interest in art from a very early age. Joseph later became an official and a director of The Aetna Life Insurance Company. Joseph, in turn, was the son of Samuel Church, who founded the first paper mill in Lee, Massachusetts in the Berkshires. The family's wealth came from Church's father, a silversmith and watchmaker in Hartford, Connecticut. Church was the son of Eliza (née Janes) and Joseph Church. In his later years, Church painted classical Mediterranean and Middle Eastern scenes and cityscapes.įrederic Edwin Church was a direct descendant of Richard Church, who was a Puritan pioneer from England who accompanied Thomas Hooker on the original journey through the wilderness from Massachusetts to what would become Hartford, Connecticut. Church's paintings put an emphasis on light and a Romantic respect for natural detail. He was a central figure in the Hudson River School of American landscape painters, perhaps best known for painting large panoramic landscapes, often depicting mountains, waterfalls, and sunsets, but also sometimes depicting dramatic natural phenomena that he saw during his travels to the Arctic and Central and South America. Search in Church’s paintings and those circles will be found.Frederic Edwin Church (– April 7, 1900) was an American landscape painter born in Hartford, Connecticut. Science and art history are not at odds with each other as many may think, left or right, liberal or conservative.Īs the poet Rainer Maria Rilke noted “I live my life in ever-widening circles that stretch themselves out.” “It was really a breakthrough for Church,” she notes.Ĭhurch would go on to create Niagara(1857), a view of the iconic Niagara Falls owned by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. In painting Andes, notes Slaby, the artist succeeded in “uniting both the macro and micro” of nature and spirituality, bringing into concert the natural and the supernatural, whatever the latter might mean to the individual viewer. Humboldt believed, as did Church, that regardless of one’s spiritual or religious beliefs, the study of science and nature were not incompatible with Christianity or Judaism.Īs a scientist, Humboldt “was exhorting landscape painters to go to South America and paint what he perceived as this very kind of pristine, unspoiled kind of landscape,” Allison Slaby, Curator at the Reynolda House Museum of American Art, which owns Andes.Īt the time, Andes was the largest painting that Church had created. Working in New York State, Church felt viscerally gripped by the writings of Alexander von Humboldt, the German academic and scientist who had traversed South America and researched the human connection to nature.
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