(Skip to bullet points (best for students))
Born: 1826
Died: 1900
Summary of Frederic Edwin Church
Landscape paintings by Frederic Edwin Church combine the religious and the strange, the natural and the manmade, in equal measure. He was a key player in the Hudson River School movement in American painting, as well as the development of Western landscape painting in general, and his work encapsulates all the paradoxes of the society that gave rise to it. He was a technically gifted draughtsman who was concerned with the exact portrayal of flora, animals, and atmospheric effects, but he also recognised the importance of illusion, frequently constructing his landscapes from preparatory sketches taken at several locations. From New York State to the Arctic and the Andes, he covered it all.
Frederic Edwin Church was a master of light and air painting during the Romantic period. His art became known not just for its careful landscape renderings, but also for its equal attention to sunshine, moonlight, cloud, mist, and other ethereal characteristics of place. In this way, his paintings are similar to the Luminism subgenre of American Romantic landscape painting, albeit they lack the style’s focus on quiet and stillness.
If Thomas Cole’s paintings made the Hudson River Valley renowned, Frederic Edwin Church made Hudson River Valley artists famous for painting the rest of the globe. Church’s creative excursions brought him to exotic and isolated locales, from the Arctic Circle to the Middle East, but Cole’s travels were mostly limited to the United States. His work embodies the confident, curious, and even startled gaze of the nineteenth-century West on the rest of the globe, and it pulsates with the spirit of exploration.
Church’s work, as a member of the Hudson River School’s second generation, enacts a shift away from the first-generation artists’ symbolic unity, in which each aspect of the landscape has a coded allegorical meaning, and toward a purer concentration on the natural environment. This went hand in hand with a goal to scientifically study, taxonomize, and comprehend the terrain.
Childhood
Frederick Edwin Church was born in 1826 to a businessman father and a housewife mother in New Haven, Connecticut. Even though his ancestors were among the country’s Protestant founding fathers, the people who made up his immediate family came from humble origins, according to him. Bonnet-making and other enterprises, including milling and insurance, earned his family a fortune. In any case, Church’s father was both wealthy and well-connected, and when his son Frederic showed an early talent for painting, his father arranged for Frederic to study under the renowned Connecticut collector and painter Thomas Cole.
It wasn’t until the 1840s that an Englishman named Thomas Lawrence Cole was widely acknowledged as the father of the Hudson River School and American landscape painting. His yearly trips to the Catskill Mountains, where he painted, were famous. During his four-year apprenticeship from 1844 to 1848, Church became one of Cole’s favourite pupils and would go on to continue the American Romantic movement in landscape painting. In the same way as Cole did, Church began painting the landscapes of upstate New York after moving there in 1849. He visited Vermont, Bar Harbor, Maine, South America, the Levant, and the Arctic Circle in search of subject matter.
Early Life
The end of the 1850s saw Church gaining broad critical recognition and becoming a successful businessman, who relied almost entirely on the sale of his paintings for his livelihood. One of Church’s requests, for example, was that his 1859 painting The Heart of the Andes be insured for up to $10,000, which was a significant amount of money at the time. In addition, his decision to have solo exhibitions in both New York and London had a significant role in his success.
Another example is the marketing of his enormous painting Niagara (1857), which showed his belief in getting the most publicity possible for his work and helped him gain an international audience. According to art critic and Church historian Tim Barringer, Church’s activities typified the historical period’s transatlantic culture, which saw artists and businessmen travelling back and forth across the ocean. Through this culture, Church, like his mentor Cole, kept in touch with the European landscape heritage, especially with British painters like John Constable and J.M.W. Turner.
In 1860, Church tied the knot with Isabel Carnes. According to legend, the two men’s relationship was inspired in part by the enormous success of Church’s two-year-long travelling exhibition The Heart of the Andes, which stopped in eight U.S. cities as well as the United Kingdom during that time. Church was a wandering spirit who had the financial means to see the world. A two-man voyage to the North Atlantic in 1859 to sketch icebergs between Labrador and Greenland, which would eventually be developed into finished oil paintings, began with his companion, priest Louis Legrand Noble.
Mid Life
Shortly after their marriage, Church and Isabel settled in a small apartment in the Hudson Valley of New York State. Over two decades before, while still a student of Thomas Cole, he had drawn the countryside from a vantage point. A dairy herd was imported, trees were planted, and a small house called Cosy Cottage was built as part of Church’s renovation of the 126-acre property. It was easy for him to go to New York City from his new home, since the 10th Street Studio Building was just a short walk away. When Frederic and Isabel’s two infant children died of diphtheria in 1865, they were heartbroken.
It was a holiday that ultimately led to further employment for the couple who had spent six months in Jamaica during their recovery. The next year, they had their first child, a boy named Frederic Joseph, who would survive to adulthood.
After making a fortune as a painter in his latter years, Church tried his hand at a new artistic endeavour. He bought a piece of land near his estate in 1869 and started building a house for himself and his wife there. Following an 18-month trip that included a visit to the Holy Land, Church was moved to add an Oriental sensibility after seeing the intricate details of Damascus, Jerusalem, and Beirut buildings up close.
It was completed in 1872 and is still standing on a magnificent bluff over the Hudson River. As a result, the building’s architecture complements a lot of his earlier work, such as his painting Springtime in the Levant, which depicts ancient Middle Eastern locales with an exoticizing, Oriental splendour (1879).
Late Life
Church’s work began to fade from view as he neared the end of his life, in part because of rheumatoid arthritis, which hampered his ability to create new work, and in part because his most daring and innovative landscapes had eluded him before that point in his career. Staying in Olana, he continued painting and drew inspiration from his previous trips to the Middle East and the North Atlantic as he did so. Every year, Church flew to Mexico to avoid the bitter New York winters. His son Louis and daughter-in-law Sally lived in Olana with him until his death in 1900.
Church’s last years were not filled with happiness. Among the highlights of his time at Olana were visits from literary greats like Mark Twain and the de Forests, who came to take pictures of the house and gardens. By the 1890s, Church had accumulated enough financial success to be able to start buying his own paintings, such as Catskill Mountains from the Home of the Artist, which he purchased at auction in 1890. This let him to stop worrying about the pressures of being a creative artist.
Famous Art by Frederic Edwin Church
Morning, Looking East over the Hudson Valley to the Catskill Mountains
1849
This ethereal dawn exemplifies Church’s early work, particularly the influence of Thomas Cole. The work is softly yet painstakingly constructed, in line with Church’s Romantic background. As the glittering sliver of the Hudson River glistens far below, a crescent-like break in the stony landscape spreads out onto the Valley. The clouds are stained with reddish light, and the man in the foreground examines the world spread out before him, turning away from the spectator to watch the environment, a motif recognisable from older European paintings such as Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer over the Sea of Fog (c. 1818).
The Heart of the Andes
1859
This is Church’s most important and biggest work after two trips to South America in 1853 and 1857. In the front, many plants are shown in minute detail. The artwork is three metres broad and depicts a plethora of wildlife. Another interesting visual feature in this scene is the stand of silver-barked trees to your right. These plants’ roots are dangling dangerously over the centre pond. A few other artists’ work at this period has a strange visual intensity that is only generated by curious details like these, which must be based on firsthand observation.
Our Banner in the Sky
1861
This is undoubtedly one of Church’s most intimate pieces, despite its rarity in the context of his larger body of work. Our Banner in the Sky is considered to have been completed in the year when the Unionist and Confederate troops went to war. The Union flag is formed by a gap in the evening clouds placed against a blue, star-filled sky striped with red light, with a dead tree in the foreground functioning as improvised flagpole. This is an overt – if not overdone – visual reference to the Civil War, and it clearly shows Church’s allegiances in the fight.
Aurora Borealis
1865
The Northern Lights, also known as the Aurora Borealis, are shown in this artwork as they dance over the Arctic Ocean. It shows Church’s ability for creating formal methods that correctly conveyed complicated and delicate meteorological phenomena, as seen by the dancing light in the sky. A clear yet slithering line can be seen crisscrossing the sky among the sea of blue, yellow, and red.
Niagara Falls, from the American Side
1867
This massive picture is Church’s most major contribution to high Sublime landscape painting, a method that began in England in the late eighteenth century with the work of J.M.W. Turner and others. Church may have believed that the most effective weapon at his disposal was size, in order to convey to his viewers a feeling of the immensity of his subject matter. As a result, this picture stands more than two and a half metres tall, with the viewer sitting on a rocky ledge above the entrance of the falls, the eye drawn down and over into vertiginous depths.
El Khasné, Petra
1874
Church painted a number of works after visiting the Middle East in the late 1860s and early 1870s, and this is one of them. Church provides a stunning view of Petra’s neoclassical columns rising from dark, towering stone pathways, possibly for the first time since they originally appeared in different pop-culture allusions. The building’s façade is cleverly concealed by the jagged frame created by the adjacent rock faces, which draws the viewer’s attention inside. A tiny patch of walkway in the front seems to be inviting us in; in fact, the framing and angles have been carefully controlled to imply the viewpoint of a person approaching on foot……….
BULLET POINTED (SUMMARISED)
Best for Students and a Huge Time Saver
- Landscape paintings by Frederic Edwin Church combine the religious and the strange, the natural and the manmade, in equal measure.
- He was a key player in the Hudson River School movement in American painting, as well as the development of Western landscape painting in general, and his work encapsulates all the paradoxes of the society that gave rise to it.
- He was a technically gifted draughtsman who was concerned with the exact portrayal of flora, animals, and atmospheric effects, but he also recognised the importance of illusion, frequently constructing his landscapes from preparatory sketches taken at several locations.
- From New York State to the Arctic and the Andes, he covered it all.
- Frederic Edwin Church was a master of light and air painting during the Romantic period.
- His art became known not just for its careful landscape renderings, but also for its equal attention to sunshine, moonlight, cloud, mist, and other ethereal characteristics of place.
- In this way, his paintings are similar to the Luminism subgenre of American Romantic landscape painting, albeit they lack the style’s focus on quiet and stillness.
- If Thomas Cole’s paintings made the Hudson River Valley renowned, Frederic Edwin Church made Hudson River Valley artists famous for painting the rest of the globe.
- Church’s creative excursions brought him to exotic and isolated locales, from the Arctic Circle to the Middle East, but Cole’s travels were mostly limited to the United States.
- Church’s work, as a member of the Hudson River School’s second generation, enacts a shift away from the first-generation artists’ symbolic unity, in which each aspect of the landscape has a coded allegorical meaning, and toward a purer concentration on the natural environment.
Information Citations
En.wikipedia.org, https://en.wikipedia.org/.
