Both Cole and Church were devout Protestants, and the latter's beliefs played a role in his paintings, especially his early canvases. Church usually "hid" his brushstrokes so that the painting surface was smooth and the painter's "personality" seemingly absent.Ĭhurch was the product of the second generation of the Hudson River School, a movement in American landscape art founded by his teacher Thomas Cole. The emphasis on nature is encouraged by low horizontal lines and a preponderance of sky. This tradition carried on in the works of Church, who idealizes an uninterrupted nature, highlighted by his excruciatingly detailed art. Artists of the Romantic period often depicted nature in idealized scenes that depicted the richness and beauty of nature, sometimes with emphasis on its grand scale. Romanticism was prominent in Britain and France in the early 1800s as a counter-movement to the rationalism of the Age of Enlightenment. New England Scenery (1851) was Church's "first true composite landscape"-it used sketches from various locations to develop a more detailed and spatially complex landscape than found in Cole's work. He took his own students including Walter Launt Palmer, William James Stillman and Jervis McEntee. In 1848, he was elected as the youngest Associate of the National Academy of Design and was promoted to full member the following year. His first recorded sale of a painting was in 1846 to Hartford's Wadsworth Athenaeum for $130 it was a pastoral depicting Hooker's journey in 1636. During his time with Cole, he travelled around New England and New York to make sketches, visiting East Hampton, Long Island, Catskill Mountain House, The Berkshires, New Haven, and Vermont. Cole wrote that Church had "the finest eye for drawing in the world". Church studied with him for two years by this time his talent was more than evident. In 1844, aged 18, Church became the pupil of landscape artist Thomas Cole in Catskill, New York after Daniel Wadsworth, a family neighbor and founder of the Wadsworth Athenaeum, introduced the two. The family's wealth allowed Frederic to pursue his interest in art from a very early age. His mother's brother was Adrian Janes, who owned an iron foundry that constructed the U.S. His father was successful in business as a silversmith and jeweler and was a director at several financial firms. Frederic had two sisters and no surviving brothers. In his prime, he was one of the most famous painters in the United States.įrederic Edwin Church was a direct descendant of Richard Church, a Puritan pioneer from England who accompanied Thomas Hooker on the original journey through the wilderness from Massachusetts to what would become Hartford, Connecticut. He debuted some of his major works in single-painting exhibitions to a paying and often enthralled audience in New York City. Church's paintings put an emphasis on realistic detail, dramatic light, and panoramic views. He was a central figure in the Hudson River School of American landscape painters, best known for painting large landscapes, often depicting mountains, waterfalls, and sunsets. The impressively real character of the landscapes testifies to the great skill of Frederic Edwin Church.Frederic Edwin Church was an American landscape painter born in Hartford, Connecticut. With The Andes of Ecuador and The Heart of the Andes, two large-format compositions were created from sketches. The impressively real character of the landscapes testifies to the great skill of Frederic Edwin Church. But they are composed of real fragments with symbols, often of a religious and patriotic nature. The finished works seem so real that they give the viewer the impression of reality. With his life centered in New York, he traveled during the summer months and the rest of the year he made pictures based on his sketches and memories. Inspired by Alexander von Humboldts pictorial travelogues, Church was drawn to distant lands. His talent and precise manner of representation made the artist one of the most important representatives of the Hudson River School. With the connection to his teacher and mentor Thomas Cole, Church moved away from the pure reproduction of what he saw and gave his pictures symbolic character and something parable-like. His love for the landscape of his native Connecticut made him create detailed illustrations. Born into economic independence, Frederic Edwin Church devoted himself to painting.
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