South American Landscape
Tropical Scenery (alt. title)
Church, Frederic Edwin, American painter, 1826-1900
1873
oil on canvas
Gift of the Friends of Art, 1964

In the early decades of the nineteenth century, the landscape began to take on new prominence in the American consciousness. There were several reasons for this increasing respect and affection for the land. The country was enjoying relative prosperity. The frontier was expanding further Westward, revealing more and more of the natural wonders of North America. And the Romantic movement, led in America by writers such as Emerson and Thoreau, tended to invest the natural world with divine presence. Underpinning this new consciousness was the idea of “Manifest Destiny”, the belief held by artists and citizens alike -- that the United States had been chosen to become a great nation, not only in the magnificence of its scenery, but in the rightness of its principles. These themes sustained more than a generation of landscape painters, of whom Frederic Edwin Church was one of the best.

Church was born in Hartford, Connecticut. At the age of 18, he began to study with Thomas Cole (1801-1848), America’s leading landscapist, through whom he became well-versed in European styles and artistic theory. A year later, Church exhibited his work at the National Academy of Design in New York and was named an Associate Member. By 1848, he established his own studio in New York. His progress had been, and continued to be, nothing less than meteoric. His popularity rose even more throughout the 1850s and early 1860s. Abruptly, though, in the late 1860s, tastes changed. Church was eclipsed by artists working in other styles. He devoted most of his remaining years to “Olana,” his Moorish—inspired home on the Hudson River. Church’s reputation has been restored only within the last 30 years.

Church had a brilliant inborn talent and enough confidence to turn from Cole’s style to a more straightforward and factual mastery of light in all its clarity and shadows, his sense of natural drama and his attention to mood make his paintings more than mere renderings.

Church was an inveterate traveler, visiting South America, the Arctic, the Middle East and North Africa. Like most painters of his day, he composed his pictures later in the studio. He was particularly well-known for his South American landscapes, of which the Museum’s painting is a prime example. Painted in 1873, it calls to mind the novelist Henry James’ references to “Mr. Church’s velvety vistas and gem-like vegetation.”. The broad sweep of the Andes seems endless against the horizon. Late afternoon light follows a disappearing storm cloud. The palm trees and foliage in the foreground reflect Church’s botanical accuracy. The only vestiges of humanity are a dwarfed human figure in a boat at left, a tone-arched bridge and a church steeple, probably indicating the presence of a small mountain village.

Church carefully composed South American Landscape to create a serene view of an exotic place, remote to most North Americans and, therefore, curious and awe-inspiring.