Frederic edwin church biography
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In offering such an overt symbolic conceit, Church stepped outside the general pattern of developmet which characterizes his work. There they traced Jesus‘ mission through Palestine based on descriptions in the gospels. On the other hand, it suggests the uncomprehending wonder felt by Church and others like him on encountering the ancient past of the Middle East, a wonder colored by the impending intellectual relativism and religious crises of the late nineteenth century.
His reputation steadily rose, and today he is celebrated as one of America’s greatest landscape artists.
Frederic Edwin Church’s work remains on display in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Wadsworth Atheneum, and many others. His landscapes became visual sermons—grand, illuminating, and morally uplifting.
Though his ancestors were amongst the Protestant founding fathers of the United States, his immediate heritage was rather more prosaic. Viewers paid admission to stand before it, often moved to tears by its beauty. Curious details like must surely be based on direct observation, and help to generate a peculiar visual intensity only found in a handful of other painters' work at this time.
Acquiring a plot of land adjacent to his estate, in 1869 he began designing a home for him and his wife. Our Banner in the Sky is thought to have been executed in the year that war broke out between the Unionist and Confederate forces. Aurora Borealis can therefore be seen as bringing together a range of contemporary perspectives on its subject-matter, speaking to both the pioneering scientific spirit and awe-seeking Romantic sensiblities of its age.
Oil on canvas - Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC
1867
Niagara Falls, from the American Side
This huge work represents Church's most significant contribution to landscape painting in the high Sublime style, an approach which originated in England in the late eighteenth century with the work of J.M.W.
Both Church's first son and daughter died in March, 1865 of diphtheria, but he and his wife started a new family with the birth of Frederic Joseph in 1866. A visitor center offers a film and panel exhibit as well as a Museum Shop, operated by The Olana Partnership, offering books and many items inspired by the exotic locales of Church's travels and paintings.
When his 1859 work The Heart of the Andes was transported to England for exhibition, for example, Church insisted that it was insured for up to $10,000, a huge sum of money at the time. Visitors were—and still are—struck by the harmony between the home and its environment. His engagement with global scenery expanded the American artistic vocabulary beyond national borders.
Church’s global pursuits reinforced his belief that nature was a manifestation of divine order.
Church had just returned from an eighteen-month tour which included a pilgrimage in the Holy Land, and was inspired by the details of buildings in Damascus, Jerusalem and Beirut to bring an Oriental sensibility to the design of the house. A full-scale painting made during one of those visits, Niagara (1857), is horizontally disposed, emphasizing the flow of water towards and over the edge of the precipice.
In this period, Church also accepted the role of Parks Commissioner in New York City and became a founding trustee of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The primary role Church assumed in the design and construction of his house coincided with the onset of rheumatoid arthritis, which eventually retarded if not arrested his artistic output and drove him to seek seasonal relief in annual winter visits to Mexico.
From a young age, Church showed exceptional talent in drawing and painting, often sketching from nature in the fields and woods near his home. During a four-year tutelage from 1844 to 48, Church became Cole's favored pupil, and would carry forward the project of American Romantic landscape painting. As a leading member of the Hudson River School, Church helped establish a distinctly American approach to painting that blended realism with idealism.
Hayes made provisional sketches of what he saw which, in combination with the details of his written narrative, provided Church with his source-material.