Frederic Edwin Church

American, 1826 - 1900

Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution – Share Alike License

American landscape painter (1826–1900)

Explore Selected Works

""

Representative Etchings by Artists Today in America

James J. Calahan, Charles Frederick William Mielatz, Frederick A. Stokes Company, Ripley Hitchcock, Frederic Edwin Church, Robert Frederick Blum, James S. King, Stephen Parrish, Herman N. Hyneman, Frederick W. Freer, Frank M. Gregory, Stephen James Ferris · 1887 · bound volume with ten etchings on wove paper by various artists ·  Accession ID  2018.44.84

We look through a tropical forest lining a hazy, wide, placid river in this horizontal landscape painting. Densely packed trees, bushes, and plants create shadowed, thickly forested banks along both sides of the river. The trees are covered with climbing vines, and they have gnarled, sprawling branches. Light catches the flat leaves of a palm-like plant close to us to our left, and once we take a closer look, we find two minuscule black birds with cherry-red chests perched on a long curving stem. The vegetation is reflected in the water’s surface into the distance, where it becomes pale mauve-pink and blends imperceptibly with the sky and clouds. A flock of white birds create a long line low over the water to our right. The sun is a small disk of white low in the humid sky amid pale lavender-purple clouds. The sun reflects in the calm surface of the water below, and it brings our attention to a person rowing a canoe, barely visible on the river in the deep, misty distance.
Frederic Edwin Church, El Rio de Luz (The River of Light), 1877, oil on canvas, Gift of the Avalon Foundation, 1965.14.1

El Rio de Luz (The River of Light)

Frederic Edwin Church · 1877 · oil on canvas ·  Accession ID  1965.14.1

We hover over the bottle-green surface of a river as it rushes toward a horseshoe-shaped waterfall that curves away from us in this horizontal landscape painting. The water is white and frothy right in front of us, where the shelf of the riverbed changes levels near the edge of the falls. Across from us, the water is also white where it falls over the edge. A thin, broken rainbow glints in the mist near the upper left corner of the painting and continues its arc farther down, between the falls. The horizon line is just over halfway up the composition. Plum-purple clouds sweep into the composition at the upper corners against a lavender-colored sky. Tiny trees and a few buildings line the shoreline to the left and right in the deep distance.
Frederic Edwin Church, Niagara, 1857, oil on canvas, Corcoran Collection (Museum Purchase, Gallery Fund), 2014.79.10

Niagara

Frederic Edwin Church · 1857 · oil on canvas ·  Accession ID  2014.79.10

We look across a palm-tree lined river winding into the distance before a monumental, snow-covered mountain at the center of the composition in this horizontal landscape. The spit of land along the riverbank in the lower left corner is filled with lush vegetation, including waving ferns, vines, leafy trees, and palm trees. At the bottom center of the composition, along the shoreline, a boat with a pointed prow is occupied by three people wearing white pants. Two of the men are bare-chested and the third wears a red shirt. The boat is covered with a rounded, hut-like structure and tendrils of white paint, perhaps indicating smoke from a fire, waft up in front of the opening to the structure. The placid river widens beyond the boat and across from us, the distant shore is lined with white buildings with brown thatched roofs and a white church with two spires and a red tile roof. Trees around and beyond the buildings fill in the space before brown hills that eventually lead to the snowy peaks of the central mountain. The earthy moss and sage green and tawny brown of the vegetation and river closer to us fades to pale caramel and pinkish-tan in the hazy distance. A few birds fly across the pale blue sky to our left, and wisps of light gray clouds float in from our right. The artist signed and dated the work in the lower left corner: “Church 1854.”
Frederic Edwin Church, Tamaca Palms, 1854, oil on canvas, Corcoran Collection (Gift of William Wilson Corcoran), 2014.79.11

Tamaca Palms

Frederic Edwin Church · 1854 · oil on canvas ·  Accession ID  2014.79.11

Frederic Edwin Church, Magdalena River, New Granada, Equador, 1853, graphite heightened with white on wove paper, John Davis Hatch Collection, Avalon Fund, 1981.4.2

Magdalena River, New Granada, Equador

Frederic Edwin Church · 1853 · graphite heightened with white on wove paper ·  Accession ID  1981.4.2

Bibliography

1966

  • Huntington, David C. The Landscapes of Frederic Edwin Church: Vision of an American Era. New York, 1966.

1987

  • Kelly, Franklin, and Gerald L. Carr. The Early Landscapes of Frederic Edwin Church. Fort Worth, 1987.

1988

  • Kelly, Franklin. Frederic Edwin Church and the National Landscape. Washington, D.C., 1988.

1989

  • Kelly, Franklin, Stephen Jay Gould, and James Anthony Ryan. Frederic Edwin Church. Exh. cat. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1989.

1994

  • Carr, Gerald L. Frederic Edwin Church: Catalogue Raisonné of Works of Art at Olana State Historic Site. Cambridge, England, and New York, 1994.

1996

  • Kelly, Franklin, with Nicolai Cikovsky, Jr., Deborah Chotner, and John Davis. American Paintings of the Nineteenth Century, Part I. The Collections of the National Gallery of Art Systematic Catalogue. Washington, D.C., 1996: 62-63.