The Icebergs. Frederic Edwin Church · Public domain · source

Frederic Edwin Church

Public domain1826-1900·American·painting·Wikipedia ↗

Who

Born in Hartford, Connecticut, on 4 May 1826; died in New York City on 7 April 1900. At eighteen he became Thomas Cole's pupil at Catskill and studied with him for two years. He painted vast, exact landscapes of Niagara, the Andes, the icebergs of the North Atlantic and Petra, and built Olana, his house above the Hudson.

Why they matter

He turned a landscape painting into an event. The Heart of the Andes opened in New York in 1859 as a one-picture show: thousands paid to see it, sitting on benches before a huge frame that played the part of a window onto the mountains, some of them with opera glasses. It then sold for the highest price yet paid for a work by a living American artist. His pictures were built to be looked into for a long time, detail by detail, and the showmanship was part of the work.

What to buy

Prints: the National Gallery of Art in Washington, which owns Niagara, prints it to order on paper and frames it as you choose, from its own photography, and its shop sells a ready-made 11 x 14 inch print. A reproduction from the museum that owns the painting is the one to trust over an anonymous poster. Books: Franklin Kelly's Frederic Edwin Church, the catalogue of the National Gallery of Art's 1989 retrospective, is the standard book; Kevin Avery's Church's Great Picture: The Heart of the Andes (Metropolitan Museum, 1993) is the close reading of his most famous painting. Look for both secondhand on AbeBooks. Originals: not realistic. The big paintings are in museums and at Olana.

Notes

Church bought hilltop land above the Hudson before leaving for Europe in 1867, began a Persian-inspired house there in 1870 with the architect Calvert Vaux, and moved in with his family in the summer of 1872. It is now the Olana State Historic Site, run with The Olana Partnership, and still holds his El Khasne, Petra (1874). Niagara came to the National Gallery of Art with the Corcoran Collection.

Story

In June 1859 Church and his friend the writer Louis Legrand Noble took a steamship from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to St. John's, Newfoundland, into iceberg waters. The big canvas that came of it went on show in New York in April 1861, just as the Civil War began, under the title The North, which meant both the Arctic and the Union. The war swallowed it. "Upon ordinary occasions a new picture by Mr. Church would be for a time an object of central attention," the New York World wrote. "At present the war excitement absorbs every other." Before showing it in London in June 1863 Church renamed it The Icebergs and added a ship's mast. The British businessman and MP Edward Watkin bought it and hung it at his house, Rose Hill, now part of Manchester. After Watkin died in 1901 the painting more or less sank from sight for three quarters of a century, while Rose Hill became a home for boys. Then the matron, Mair Baulch, looking for ways to raise money, turned to the picture on the wall. Manchester City Council took it to Sotheby's, and on 25 October 1979 it set an auction record for an American painting. The buyers, identified only in 2010 as Lamar and Norma Hunt, gave it to the Dallas Museum of Art, where it remains.

Key works

Niagara (1857) - National Gallery of Art, Washington
The Heart of the Andes (1859) - The Met, New York
Twilight in the Wilderness (1860) - Cleveland Museum of Art
The Icebergs (1861) - Dallas Museum of Art
Aurora Borealis (1865) - Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington
The Parthenon (1871) - The Met, New York

Frederic Edwin Church

Who

Why they matter

What to buy

Notes

Story

Key works

In museum collections

See the work

Prints

Books

See also