Past Exhibition

Frederic Edwin Church

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

Details

  • Dates

    -

  • Locations

    East Building, Upper Level, Northeast, North Bridge, and Mezzanine, Northeast
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

Overview: 49 paintings by Frederic Edwin Church were shown, including large-scale works from the late 1850s and the 1860s. These paintings had never been seen together, even during the artist's lifetime.

Organization: Franklin Kelly, curator of collections at the Corcoran Gallery of Art and previously curator of American art at the National Gallery, was exhibition curator with the help of Nicolai Cikovsky Jr., curator of American painting and deputy senior curator of paintings at the National Gallery. Gaillard Ravenel and Mark Leithauser designed the exhibition, and Gordon Anson designed the lighting.

Attendance: 297,329

Catalog: Frederic Edwin Church, by Franklin Kelly with Stephen Jay Gould, James Anthony Ryan, and Debora Rindge. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1989.

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