|
Frederic Edwin Church
(May 4,1826, Hartford - Apr.7,1900 New York) American Oil Painting Artist Biography.
Frederic Edwin Church went first to the tropics and volcanoes of South America, when American artists of the mid 19th century usually went to Europe or the western frontier in order to expand their repertoire.
In 1844, at the age of 18, with the help of the art patron Daniel Wadsworth, he became the famous Hudson River School painter Thomas Cole's only pupil, they remained friends throughout their lives. He was soon proficient enough to begin exhibiting. He became the youngest artists to be elected to the status of academician at the National Academy of Design in 1850, the same year, Church was also elected a member of the Century Association.
By the early 1850's, Church was not only oil painting views of specific American places with topographical exactitude, he was also combining separate elements of meticulously detailed scenery into landscapes of heroic breadth and depth. Church traveled from the arctic to the tropics making detailed sketches in search of material for his elegant oil paintings. His oil paintings were often extremely large and they enthralled crowds with their realistic, technical virtuosity.
He was very impressed by the writings of the German naturalist, Alexander von Humboldt, whose influential Cosmos: Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe first appeared in English in 1849. Von Humboldt's goal was to prove that behind the complexity of the natural world was a divine order and he recognized the importance of landscape art in revealing this order. Von Humboldt specifically encouraged landscape oil painters to travel to those parts of the world having the greatest botanical and geological variety. Von Humboldt, who had set off for the tropics of South America in 1799, so inspired Church that in 1853 he became the first American artist to visit South America. He retraced Humboldt's 1802 route from Barranquilla, Colombia to Guayaquil, Ecuador, through the northern Andes where he made sketches of rivers, waterfalls and volcanoes. Church even stayed in a house where Humboldt had lived.
With his reputation firmly established by such tropical scenes, Frederic Edwin Church returned to the tropics in 1857 accompanied by Charles Remy Mignot (1831-1870), a fellow landscape oil painter from the United States. He landed this time on the coast of Ecuador at Guayaquil and pushed east into the interior jungle to sketch the volcanoes Chimborazo, Cotopaxi and Sangay. By January, 1858, he had begun his most ambitious, complex, and largest tropical scene, Heart of the Andes, almost 6 X 10 feet (1858, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, N.Y.). Technically brilliant in its detailed rendering of an immensely wide and deep vista, the painting was seen upon payment of twenty-five cents by more than twelve thousand people during three weeks in Church's 10th Street Studio Building in New York City.
In 1859, Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species turned on its head Humboldt's concept that nature evolved toward harmony as the result of a guiding divine force. According to Darwin, the state of nature was competition and struggle, not harmony. Thus was shattered a basic American concept of nature and landscape painting, namely, that man could turn to nature for moral guidance. By the late 1870s, the very ability to detail miles of scenery had become less admired than the creation of poetic visions. In the 1860s and early 1870s, Church turned away from the crystal clear, meticulously detailed views of vast expanses of the tropics in favor of sunlit landscapes of America, icebergs of the far North and the coast of Maine. In 1867 he made his first trip to Europe and visited the Middle East, which provided exotic subjects for paintings of the Old World.
In 1876 he suffered from his first attack of inflammatory rheumatism, which led him to paint with his left hand. By 1880 Church's oil painting activity declined markedly. He turned his interest to the embellishment of his home, Olana, his house on the Hudson River, now a museum in his memory
Among his major works are Andes of Ecuador (1855), Niagara (1857) and Cotopaxi (1862). In his lifetime, Church received great praise for his work and sold his paintings for very high prices. He was a founding trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and served with the institution from 1870 to 1887. Enthusiasm for Church's works was rekindled in the late 20th century, when art historians began to consider him one of the foremost American landscape oil painters. Church's long-lost masterpiece, The Icebergs (1861) was rediscovered in 1979.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
The Iceberg
|
Cotopaxi
|
Niagara
|
Our Banner in the Sky
|
West Rock, New Haven
|
View all the church oil painting art reproductions.
William Merritt Chase
Thomas Cole
Return to the famous world artist biography home page.
Every oil painting reproduction is a 100% hand painted on canvas oil painting done in the traditional manner.
Frederic Edwin Church, American, art museum reproduction oil painting reproductions, art reproduction oil painting, famous art artwork copy oil paintings reproductions, famous artist painters reproduction oil painting art reproductions oil paintings, Frederic Edwin Church oil painting reproduction, famous artists copy oil painting copies, wholesale art reproduction oil paintings, wholesale oil painting art reproductions, Romantic, South American Andes landscape oil paintings, Niagara waterfall, volcanoes Cotopaxi, tropical oil paintings, The Icebergs, Hudson River School oil paintings, botanical oil paintings, Frederic Edwin Church biography.
|
