Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900), the greatest landscape painter in American history, has long deserved a resuscitation of his once-towering reputation.
Since the 1960s, when the research of art historian David Huntington brought Church out of the shadows, his rediscovery has only gradually progressed. In 1978, the Smithsonian organized a selection of Church's masterful oil sketches; the following year, his colossal painting The Icebergs (1861) resurfaced in England and was auctioned at Sotheby's for $2.5 million, then a record price for an American painting: In 1980, the National Gallery's exhibition American Light: The Luminist Movement, 1850-1875 featured Church; in 1984, Church's preparatory drawings were surveyed at the Hudson River Museum; and during the past decade, a number of interesting studies have expanded our knowledge and appreciation of various aspects of Church's career.
The culmination of this revival is an extraordinary, synoptic display of Church's principal paintings, organized for the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., by Franklin Kelly, curator of collections at the Corcoran Gallery of Art and author of several studies on Church's art. This comprehensive exhibition skips over the often superb preparatory work to go straight to the finished products. Never before have all his major, large scale oil paintings been assembled in a single show. Nor can one easily remember an exhibition whose cumulative impact is more exhilarating.
The exhibition fills two floors of the East Building. The pictures are informatively labeled and given ample space, most enjoying a wall to themselves. There are many period frames, and the grandiose wooden apparatus in which Heart of the Andes (1859) was originally displayed has been re-created for the show. Potted plants in the galleries augment the landscapes, and on exhibit in the upper galleries, specially installed Moorish doors conjure up the oriental decoration of Church's Hudson River home, Olana.
The most immediate and astounding property of Church's art is its exquisite realism. In scenes ranging across the northeastern United States, eastern Canada, South America, Jamaica, Europe, the Middle East, and Mexico, his technical ability to capture both the physical environment and its atmospheric envelope lend an astonishing air of veracity to his landscapes.
Interdisciplinary Interests
But he strove for more than merely truthful evocations of exotic places. As Kelly observes, Church's art embraced not only artistic theory but popular science, religion, and issues of national identity as well. The meticulous precision with which Church rendered botanical and geological details and meteorological conditions made of his art a veritable science. Moreover, by the mid-nineteenth century, landscape had become the primary vehicle by which American artists expressed theological and nationalist sentiment. Painters of the Hudson River School revered the natural order as evidence of deity, and regarded North America's unspoiled wilderness as the new Eden in which the American Adam would seek his worldly and spiritual fortunes. Church conveyed these them in compositions of tremendous breadth and grandeur.
After the privilege of serving two years as the only apprentice of
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