

Church usually "hid" his brushstrokes so that the painting surface was smooth and the painter's "personality" seemingly absent.Ĭhurch was the product of the second generation of the Hudson River School, a movement in American landscape art founded by his teacher Thomas Cole. The emphasis on nature is encouraged by low horizontal lines and a preponderance of sky. This tradition carried on in the works of Church, who idealizes an uninterrupted nature, highlighted by his excruciatingly detailed art. Artists of the Romantic period often depicted nature in idealized scenes that depicted the richness and beauty of nature, sometimes with emphasis on its grand scale. Romanticism was prominent in Britain and France in the early 1800s as a counter-movement to the rationalism of the Age of Enlightenment. New England Scenery (1851) was Church's "first true composite landscape"-it used sketches from various locations to develop a more detailed and spatially complex landscape than found in Cole's work.
#FREDERIC EDWIN CHURCH FULL#
He was promoted to full member the following year and began to take in his own students including Walter Launt Palmer, William James Stillman and Jervis McEntee. In 1848, he was elected the youngest Associate of the National Academy of Design. His first recorded sale was in 1846 to the Wadsworth Athenaeum for $130 it was a pastoral painting depicting Hooker's journey in 1636. During his time with Cole he travelled around New England and New York to make sketches, visiting East Hampton, Connecticut, Long Island, Catskill Mountain House, The Berkshires, New Haven, Connecticut, and Vermont. Cole wrote Church had "the finest eye for drawing in the world". Church studied with him for two years by this time his talent was evident.

In 1844, aged 18, Church became the pupil of landscape artist Thomas Cole in Catskill, New York after Daniel Wadsworth, a family neighbor and founder of the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford, Connecticut, introduced the two. The family's wealth allowed Frederic to pursue his interest in art from a very early age. His mother's brother was Adrian Janes, who owned an iron foundry that constructed the U.S.

His father was successful in business as a silversmith and jeweler and was a director at several financial firms. Frederic had two sisters and no surviving brothers. In his prime, he was one of the most famous painters in the United States.įrederic Edwin Church was a direct descendant of Richard Church, a Puritan pioneer from England who accompanied Thomas Hooker on the original journey through the wilderness from Massachusetts to what would become Hartford, Connecticut. He debuted some of his major works in single-painting exhibitions to a paying and often enthralled audience in New York City. Church's paintings put an emphasis on realistic detail, dramatic light, and panoramic views. He was a central figure in the Hudson River School of American landscape painters, best known for painting large landscapes, often depicting mountains, waterfalls, and sunsets. In the end, we understand that both are essential to our appreciation of the interconnectedness of all aspects of nature.Frederic Edwin Church (– April 7, 1900) was an American landscape painter born in Hartford, Connecticut. The beauty of the auroras and Church’s appreciation of the science that explains them remind us of Humboldt’s declaration that “nature and art are clearly united in my work”-words that were equally true for Church. Ships might be trapped in solid ice, but electricity promised the possibility of global communication if it could only be harnessed. Overhead the auroras snake across the sky, their colorful arcs suggesting the snapped cables that plagued his friend and patron Cyrus Field for years as he strove to make trans-oceanic electronic communication a reality. The Canadian coast rises above the stranded ship to the west lies Ireland, the terminus of the transatlantic cable. Here an explorer’s ship is trapped in the ice. Church often infused his paintings with layers of metaphorical meaning. He chose challenging subjects: falling water, erupting volcanoes, ancient icebergs, and the electromagnetic impulses of the aurora borealis. Watkins and Isaiah West Taberįrederic Church saw himself as an American Humboldt, steeped in science as well as art. Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland.Charles Willson Peale and Titian Ramsay Peale.Online Gallery for Alexander von Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature, and Culture
