Frederic Edwin Church

Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900), American landscape painter, born in Hartford, Connecticut, who became the most widely traveled artist of his day. He studied painting at Catskill, New York, under Thomas Cole and his style as a result reflected the romanticized landscape tradition of the Hudson River School, with which Cole was associated. Like his teacher, Church painted scenes of the Hudson River Valley, but he took a more scientific approach to landscape, studying rock formations and plants and depicting them precisely. Church also painted many New England landscapes. These works include Lake Scene in Mount Desert (completed in 1851, displayed today at the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford, Connecticut), Catskill Mountains (1852, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota), and Niagara Falls (1857, Corcoran Gallery, Washington, D.C.).

As a result of reading descriptions of South America by German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt in Kosmos (published in five volumes, 1845-1862), Church became enthusiastic about the Andes Mountains and made two trips to Ecuador and Colombia. There, he made sketches and watercolors on which he based several notable paintings of luxuriant jungles and snow-capped mountains. Among the best-known paintings from the South American trips are View of Cotopaxi (1857, Art Institute of Chicago) and Heart of the Andes (1859, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City). In 1859 Church headed north to Labrador and Newfoundland to paint icebergs. He continued to travel through the 1860s, visiting Jamaica in 1865 and Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East in 1867 and 1868.

By the 1870s Church’s style of painting was no longer in fashion. Troubled by arthritis, he traveled to Mexico in winter but devoted himself primarily to building a huge house in the Moorish style on top of a hill overlooking the Hudson River in New York State. Church named the house Olana and displayed in it the many objects he had collected on his travels. Today, Olana is open as a museum and historic landmark.