Our next artist from the Hudson River School is Frederic Church. A pupil of Thomas Cole, he bucked the prevailing trend and did not go to Europe to study art. Instead, he went to South America and is one of the best-known painters of South American landscapes. He did eventually go to Europe, but only after establishing himself. Church is also odd in that he was a successful painter, dying a wealthy man. (More detailed biographies here and here.)
Like Cole and Bierstadt, Church painted in great detail on huge canvases. In fact, he gave viewers opera glasses to better examine the detail of his work. In “Niagara,” Church did not paint a foreground, giving the observer the feeling of being right on the edge of the falls. One writer exclaimed, “This is Niagara, with the roar left out!”
Ambleside Rotation is “The Heart of the Andes,” a composite image of South American topography. It was very popular when unveiled and sold for $10,000, the highest price paid for a painting by a living American artist at that time. Mark Twain remarked, “You will never get tired of looking at the picture, but your reflections — your efforts to grasp an intelligible Something — you hardly know what — will grow so painful that you will have to go away from the thing, in order to obtain relief. You may find relief, but you cannot banish the picture — it remains with you still. It is in my mind now — and the smallest feature could not be removed without my detecting it.” Miss Mason would approve.
The second painting by Church in theClicking on the above images will take you to the larger image from Wikipedia. A list of works by Frederic Church on Wikipedia (in general the best source for large, quality images) and the complete works of Church. His estate Olana in the Catskills overlooking the Hudson River is now a New York State Park.
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