Frederick Edwin Church was an American painter, whose works marked the culmination of romantic landscape painting in America and the final great expression of the group of artists identified as the Hudson River school.
Background
Frederick Edwin Church was born on May 4, 1826, in Hartford, Connecticut, United States. He was the son of Eliza and Joseph Church, a silversmith, jeweler and director of several financial firms. He had had two sisters and no surviving brothers.
Education
At an early age Frederick Church decided to become an artist. Initially, he studied for a short time with Benjamin Coe, then in 1844 went to Catskill, New York, to study with Thomas Cole, who was one of the foremost painters of the Hudson River school at that time. Though Cole died 4 years later, Church had already formed his style in the tradition of his master. During his studies with Cole, Frederick Church travelled around New England and New York to make sketches, visiting such places as East Hampton, Catskill Mountain House, Long Island, The Berkshires, New Haven, and Vermont.
Career
Frederick Church started his career as a painter, depicting classic Hudson River School scenes of New York and New England.
Church wished to travel and he read with interest Kosmos, a book by the young German scientist Alexander von Humboldt. This description of a 4-year trip to unexplored areas of Latin America inspired Frederic Church, who went to Ecuador and Colombia in 1853 and again in 1857. On these trips Church produced many beautiful pencil drawings, which he later worked up into paintings showing detailed tropical foliage with Mt. Cotopaxi or Mt. Chimborazo in the distance.
In the summer of 1859 Frederick Church went to Labrador with Cole's biographer. Church was impressed by the dramatic aspect of icebergs and created many sketches. During the Civil War, the painter was inspired to paint Our Banner in the Sky, which became a basis for a lithograph made and sold to benefit the families of Union soldiers. In 1865 he visited Jamaica and once again enjoyed sketching in a tropical environment.
In 1867, Church began the longest period of travel in his career. During his first trip to Europe, the painter visited the Bavarian Alps, Italy and Greece, as well as Palestine and Syria. A remarkable series of small oil sketches gives a pictorial account of these travels and indicates a very important side of his works. He had a remarkable feeling for light and atmosphere. His vividly painted sunsets seem almost explosive. He predicted the appearance of the 20th-century Expressionism.
When he returned to the United States in 1870, Church built Olana, a large country house on a mountaintop with an unsurpassed view of the Hudson River and the Catskill Mountains beyond. This Semi-Moorish structure designed by the artist in collaboration with the architect Calvert Vaux has been preserved as a museum. There Church assembled paintings collected in Italy, Turkish carpets, Moorish tiles and Near Eastern brass. After subsequent trips to Mexico, he added religious paintings, pre-Columbian sculpture and terra-cottas to his personal collection.
In his last decades, illness limited Frederic Church's ability to paint. By 1876, he suffered from rheumatoid arthritis, which made painting difficult. Eventually, he started to paint with his left hand and continued to produce artworks, although at a slower pace. He still taught painting, having two students, Walter Launt Palmer and Howard Russell Butler. In his later years Frederic Church often spent winters in Mexico, where he taught Butler.
Aurora Borealis, Mt Desert Island, from Bar Harbor, Maine
Figures in an Ecuadorian Landscape
Mount Katahdin from Lake Millinocket
Our Banner in the Sky
Winter Twilight from Olana
Turner Pond with Pomola Peak and Baxter Peak, Maine
Tamaca Palms
Home by the Lake
Moonrise
Sky at sunset, Jamaica, West Indies
A Waterfall in Colombia
Schoodic Peninsula from Mount Desert at Sunrise
Cotopaxi seen from Ambato, Ecuador
Icebergs and Wreck in Sunset
New England Scenery
Cotopaxi
The Meteor of 1860
Storm in the Mountains
Niagara Falls, from the American Side
Morning, Looking East over the Hudson Valley from Catskill Mountains
Membership
In 1848, Frederic Church became the youngest associate member of the National Academy of Design (later the National Academy Museum and School) and was promoted to a full member in 1849. In 1863, he was elected an associate fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
,
United States
1863
National Academy Museum and School
,
United States
1848
Interests
travelling
Connections
Frederic Church married Isabel Carnes in 1860. Their first son and daughter died in March 1865 of diphtheria. In 1866 the couple gave birth to Frederic Joseph. It is believed that Frederick and Isabel had four children.
Frederic Church: The Art and Science of Detail
The book traces Church’s movement away from working in oil on canvas to shaping the physical landscape of Olana, his self-designed estate on the Hudson River, a move that allowed the artist to rethink scale and process while also engaging with pressing ecological questions. Beautifully illustrated with dramatic spreads and striking details of Church’s works, Frederic Church: The Art and Science of Detail offers a profoundly new understanding of this canonical artist.