Flowers bloom, birds flutter, water flows, and wind seems to blow. Beyond these ‘major’ elements, the composition is filled with minute details unobservable in any reproduction. ![]() As the name suggests, the school is most closely associated with American scenery, but Church is better known for his paintings of foreign settings. A well-travelled footpath in the left foreground leads the eye to a pair of people who worship before a simple wooden cross. Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900) was among the most celebrated members of American landscape painting movement the Hudson River School. This waterway flows to the viewer’s right, eventually arriving at a waterfall-a Niagara in miniature-on the right side of the painting. There is but a little human presence in this vast depiction of space.A colonial Spanish hacienda appears in the central middle ground, resting on the banks of a river. Moving to the foreground, Church leads the viewer through a variety of topographical zones which all contain unique flora and fauna. Chimborazo, one of the highest peaks in South America. Frederic Edwin Church Niagara, 1857 West Building, Ground Floor - Gallery 37 Medium oil on canvas Dimensions overall: 101.6 × 229.9 cm (40 × 90 1/2 in.) framed: 164.5 × 286.4 × 17.8 cm (64 3/4 × 112 3/4 × 7 in.) Credit Line Corcoran Collection (Museum Purchase, Gallery Fund) Accession Number 2014.79. The monumental snow-capped mountain in the deep background is Mt. Church aspired to take many different components and assemble them into a cohesive and believable whole. Minute detail of flowers, wind, and seasons (detail), Frederic Edwin Church, Heart of the Andes, 1859, oil on canvas, 168 x 302.9 cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)If Church had ever read Twain’s remarks, there can be little doubt the artist would have been delighted. It is in my mind now-and the smallest feature could not be removed without my detecting it. You may find relief, but you cannot banish the picture-It remains with you still. We took the opera glass, and examined its beauties minutely, for the naked eye cannot discern the little wayside flowers, and soft shadows and patches of sunshine, and half-hidden bunches of grass and jets of water which form some of its most enchanting features…You will never get tired of looking at the picture, but your reflections -your efforts to grasp an intelligible Something-you hardly know what -will grow so painful that you will have to go away from the thing, in order to obtain relief. While on view in the U.S., Church’s painting was titled The North, and all exhibition proceeds were donated the Union’s Patriotic Fund (today’s Red Cross).Pamela and I have just returned from a visit to the most wonderfully beautiful painting which this city has ever seen-Church's "Heart of the Andes"-which represents a lovely valley with its rich vegetation in all the bloom and glory of a tropical summer-dotted with birds and flowers of all colors and shades of color, and sunny slopes, and shady corners, and twilight groves, and cool cascades-all grandly set off with a majestic mountain in the background with its gleaming summit clothed in everlasting ice and snow! I have seen it several times, but it is always a new picture-totally new-you seem to see nothing the second time which you saw the first. Twelve days after the attack on Fort Sumter ignited the American Civil War, The Icebergs debuted in New York on April 24, 1861. The process took him less than six months, and The Icebergs was first exhibited in 1861. His goal was to capture both the essence of his experiences among icebergs and the other-worldly sense of the Arctic environment, drawn from explorers’ written accounts and contemporary reports. As with his earlier blockbuster landscape, The Heart of the Andes (1859, Metropolitan Museum of Art), he paired his on-site observations with his imagination. He spent several weeks on a sixty-five ton schooner and used a small rowboat to venture over the deadly waters and closely study the forms and colors of icebergs in the Arctic landscape.Īfter returning to his New York City studio, Church relied on nearly one hundred pencil and oil sketches to create a large-scale painting of icebergs. ![]() In 1859, Church chartered a month long expedition in the North Atlantic, off the Canadian coasts of Newfoundland and Labrador. ![]() Yet in reality, the scene is an inhospitable place filled with danger, as the broken mast in the foreground indicates. ![]() The seductively inviting colors, glowing subterranean light, and glossy, tactile surfaces of the icebergs attract the viewer’s eye. The Icebergs is a superb example of Frederic Edwin Church’s technical skill and clever marketing. Frederic Edwin Church, Drawing, Floating Iceberg, June or July 1859 Brush and oil, graphite on paperboard, 18.8 x 37.5 cm (7 3/8 x 14 3/4 in.) Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum
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