Frederic Edwin Church

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Frederic Edwin Church, photograph by Mathew B. Brady , circa 1860

Frederic Edwin Church (born May 4, 1826 in Hartford , Connecticut , † April 7, 1900 in New York ) was an important representative of the Hudson River School , a group of American artists known for precisely painted, often dramatic and allegorical landscapes. Thomas Cole , the group's founder, was his teacher. Like the latter, Church also made it a point to give his works a meaning that went beyond the mere depiction of nature.

Life

Youth and education

New England Scenery , 1851
Cotopaxi , 1855
The Icebergs , 1861

Church came from a wealthy family. His grandfather, Samuel Church, founded the first paper mill in the Berkshire Hills , Massachusetts ; his father, Joseph Church, was a silversmith and watchmaker in Hartford, Connecticut, and later a director of an insurance company. So Frederic was able to pursue his interest in art from an early age without material constraints. At the age of eighteen he became a student of Thomas Cole in Catskill ( New York ) for two years and, like his teacher, painted views of the nearby mountain landscapes. Daniel Wadsworth, a family friend and founder of the Wadsworth Atheneum , the oldest public art museum in the United States, had introduced him to Cole. In 1849 Church was elected a member of the National Academy of Design , shortly thereafter he sold his first major work to the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford.

to travel

Church settled in New York, traveling during the summer months to make sketches for his paintings, and returning in winter to paint and sell his paintings. Since the late 1840s he was influenced by the writings of the German explorer Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859), especially by his descriptions of his five-year expedition to South America (1799-1804). In his main work “ Kosmos - Draft of a Physical Description of the World”, first published in English in 1849, Humboldt had urgently recommended the artists of his time to travel and depict the world; in particular, they should visit South America and portray the “ physiognomy ” of the Andes , one of the world's regions with the greatest geological and botanical diversity. On the route of Humboldt from 1802, Church undertook his first trip to the tropics in 1853 , accompanied and financed by the young entrepreneur Cyrus West Field , who hoped to use Church's pictures to attract donors for his South American projects. The company led from Barranquilla in Colombia through the northern Andes to Guayaquil in Ecuador .

In the spring of 1857 another trip followed, nine weeks exclusively in Ecuador, from Guayaquil east to the volcanoes Chimborazo , Cotopaxi and Sangay . Church's companion was Charles Remy Mignot, a landscape painter friend. The artistic results of the two trips cemented the reputation that Church enjoyed. Alongside Albert Bierstadt , he became the most successful American painter of his generation. By 1850, exploring the North Sea was a matter of great public interest, especially due to the spectacularly failed Franklin expedition to discover the Northwest Passage . Impressed by reports like this, Church rented a ship together with Louis Legrand Noble, the biographer Thomas Coles, to sketch icebergs in the North Atlantic between Labrador and Greenland .

In 1860 Church bought a farm near Hudson, New York, a small town in the Hudson River valley , and married Isabel Carnes (1836–1899), whom he had met the year before at the presentation of one of his paintings in New York. In 1863 Church was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . Church's first two children died of diphtheria in 1865 . Church and his wife went to Jamaica for a few months , where he intensively studied botany and the light of the tropics. Four children born in the following years remained alive. With the first of them and with Isabel's mother, the couple embarked on a family trip of 18 months through Europe and the Middle East (with the current territories of Lebanon , Israel , Palestine , Syria , Jordan and Egypt ) in 1867 , Church made a detour to Athens and to Rock city of Petra in Jordan to work there.

Olana

Olana

Shortly before leaving for the Old World , Church had acquired a piece of land on a hill above his farm that he had long wanted because of the impressive views of the Hudson River and the Catskill Mountains . Construction of a spacious house began here in 1870, and the family moved in in the summer of 1872. Originally a mansion based on the French model was planned. After the Middle East trip, all plans were changed. In collaboration with a new architect, the Englishman Calvert Vaux, a brightly ornamented, spacious building with Victorian , Persian and Moorish style elements was created. The designs for the construction and decoration came mainly from Church himself, who made hundreds of drawings for architectural details. The poet John Ashbery describes the result: "The whole thing is breathtaking, and despite the overabundance of architectural elements and the multicolored decoration, it does not look overloaded, but solemn and imaginative, like Church's painting". The property was named Olana after the historical description of a fortified treasure house located in a similar landscape in ancient Persia (today: Armenia ).

Since the mid-1870s, Church was increasingly handicapped by a rheumatic disease of the right arm, the reason for annual winter trips to the warm climate of Mexico . After all, he could only paint very slowly with his left hand. During the last 20 years of his life he devoted much of his energy to beautifying his country estate. More than half of the original farmland has been turned into a landscaped park. Church had thousands of trees replanted or moved, a swamp converted into a lake and around 8 km of driveways laid out. In addition, a summer house and a free-standing studio building were built. In 1884 the painter wrote in a letter to the sculptor Erasmus Dow Palmer: "In this way I can create more and better landscapes than when I struggle with paint and canvas in the studio".

Frederic Edwin Church was buried in Spring Grove Cemetery in Hartford, Connecticut.

plant

The Heart of the Andes , 1859

Church's main works seem like direct reproductions of real landscapes, but are mostly free adaptations of the oil and pencil sketches that he brought back from his travels. He himself called them “compositions”. From the sketches he made of rivers, waterfalls and volcanoes on his journey in 1853, he created The Andes of Ecuador (1855), with about 1.20 × 1.80 m, Church's largest painting to date. In January 1858, after the second trip, he began work on The Heart of the Andes , the representation of a tropical landscape in which various elements of his numerous surviving travel sketches can be recognized. In the composition, which is painted in great detail, a broad section of landscape is reproduced, with a view of a river in lush vegetation , of plateaus and snow-covered mountain giants - more than can normally be captured in a real scene. On April 27, 1859, Church presented the unusually large landscape format (approx. 170 × 300 cm) for the first time in a special production in New York. Curtains around the frame created the illusion of a view from the window, the room was darkened, only the painting was in the light. The audience sat on benches in front of the picture, it was provided with opera glasses to better see the details. Exotic plants increased the desired impression. In three weeks, more than 12,000 visitors paid 25 cents each to enter. The presentation then went on to see several other American cities and London for two years. The work eventually sold for $ 10,000, the highest amount paid up to that point for the work of a living American artist.

Church's painting Icebergs: The North , a result of his 1859 voyage, almost as large as The Heart of the Andes , was seen in New York and London in 1861. Other large format pictures with tropical and arctic scenes were shown as special events in private galleries. Church was less interested in expressly moral and religious allegories in landscape painting than his teacher Cole, but he also expressed religious and patriotic feelings in his work - he painted pilgrim crosses in tropical landscapes or intense light phenomena as in Aurora Borealis (1865) or Rainy Season in the Tropics (1866). His symbolic landscape painting Our Banner in the Sky was created in 1861, shortly after the storming of Fort Sumter ( South Carolina ) by the Confederates , a key event at the beginning of the American Civil War (1861-1865). Church was a staunch supporter of the Union of Northern States and presented its flag here as a celestial phenomenon. In the Northern States, the motif was widely used in a modified form as lithography . Well-known paintings that date back to the Europe and Middle East trip in 1867 are The Parthenon (1871), The Aegean Sea (1877), Landscape in Greece (1873), Sunrise in Syria (1874) and Al Khazneh, Petra (1874 ).

  • The Andes of Ecuador , ca.1855

  • Aurora Borealis 1865

  • Morning in the Tropics , 1877

  • Al Ayn (also: The Fountain ), 1882

Church regularly featured his paintings in the annual exhibitions of the National Academy of Design , the American Art Union, and the Boston Art Club , along with works by Thomas Cole, Asher Brown Durand , John Frederick Kensett, and Jasper Francis Cropsey . Critics and collectors appreciated the special form of landscape painting, their creators were collectively referred to as the Hudson River School .

Towards the end of the 19th century, the interest of collectors and the public in the artists of this group and their work decreased significantly. By 1900, at the time of his death, Church was almost forgotten. Only after 1960 did the recognition of his art gradually increase again. Church's son Louis lived in Olana with his wife until 1964. The property has been a National Historic Landmark since 1965 , is managed by the New York Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation, and is open to the public.

  • Twilight in the Wilderness , 1860

  • Al Khazneh , Petra (Jordan), 1874

  • Our Banner in the Sky , 1861

Images and collections (selection)

literature

  • Gerald L. Carr: Church, Frederic Edwin . In: General Artist Lexicon . The visual artists of all times and peoples (AKL). Volume 19, Saur, Munich a. a. 1998, ISBN 3-598-22759-0 , pp. 103-105.
  • Kevin J. Avery: Treasures from Olana: Landscapes by Frederic Edwin Church. Cornell University Press with The Olana Partnership and the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation, Ithaca and London 2005, ISBN 0-8014-4430-6 .
  • Gerald L. Carr: Frederic Edwin Church: A Catalog Raisonné of Works of Art at Olana State Historic Site . Cambridge University Press, New York, Cambridge, and Melbourne 1994, ISBN 0-521-38540-7 .
  • Gerald L. Carr: Frederic Edwin Church: In Search of the Promised Land. Berry-Hill Galleries, New York 2000, ISBN 1-58465-126-1 .
  • Gerald L. Carr: Frederic Edwin Church: Romantic Landscapes and Seascapes. Adelson Galleries, 2007.
  • John K. Howat: Frederic Church . Yale University Press, New Haven / London 2005, ISBN 0-300-10988-1 .
  • David C. Huntington: The Landscapes of Frederic Edwin Church: Vision of an American Era. Braziller, New York 1966.
  • Franklin Kelly et al. a .: Frederic Edwin Church and the National Landscape. Exhibition catalog. National Gallery of Art, Washington DC 1989.

Web links

Commons : Frederic Edwin Church  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Nils Büttner: Landscape Painting. A history. Abbeville Press Publishers, New York 2006, ISBN 0-7892-0902-0 , pp. 283-285.
  2. ↑ nationalacademy.org: Past Academicians "C" ( Memento of the original from March 20, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (accessed on March 24, 2015)  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.nationalacademy.org
  3. ^ Biographical text. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
  4. ^ The Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio. Biographical text. ( Memento of the original from November 20, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.butlerart.com
  5. ^ The Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio. Biographical text. ( Memento of the original from November 20, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.butlerart.com
  6. ^ John Ashbery: "Frederic Church at Olana: An Artist's Fantasy on the Hudson River". In Eugene Richie. Selected Prose. University of Michigan Press. P. 264 (2005). ISBN 0-472-03139-2 .
  7. ^ Frederic Edwin Church in the English language Wikipedia
  8. ^ The Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio. Biographical text. ( Memento of the original from November 20, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.butlerart.com
  9. ↑ Private page. Images and texts
personal data
SURNAME Church, Frederic Edwin
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American landscape painter
DATE OF BIRTH May 4, 1826
PLACE OF BIRTH Hartford , Connecticut
DATE OF DEATH April 7, 1900
Place of death New York City