Frederic Edwin Church

Thomas Cole's only formal student and the artist who carried the Hudson River School's ambitions furthest in scale and geographic reach. Church was born in Hartford, Connecticut, studied with Cole at his studio on the Hudson River, and absorbed his teacher's conviction that landscape painting was a moral and theological enterprise. But where Cole's most ambitious works were historical allegories, Church's were empirical — he went to the places described in the scientific writings of Alexander von Humboldt and then painted them at a size and accuracy that made the viewer feel as if they were there. Humboldt's Personal Narrative and Cosmos described the tropical Andes as the fullest expression of nature's creative power, and Church followed the routes Humboldt had taken into Ecuador and Colombia in 1853 and 1857. The resulting studio canvases — The Heart of the Andes (1859), Cotopaxi (1862), Chimborazo (1864) — were exhibited in New York and London as solo spectacles, with special frames, controlled lighting and printed guides identifying the species of plant and the geological formations visible in the distance. When Heart of the Andes opened in Manhattan in 1859, twelve thousand people paid to see it in the first week alone. In later life, crippled by inflammatory rheumatism in his painting hand, Church turned his energies to designing Olana, his home on a ridge above the Hudson River — a Persian-inspired villa with landscape gardens that he considered his masterwork. He recovered partial use of his hand and produced work into his sixties, but never at the scale of the great Andean series. Olana is now a New York State Historic Site.