Frederic Church: 80 Drawings

One of America's best landscape artists and the quintessential exponent of Romanticism, the American painter Frederic Edwin Church was an important member of the Hudson River School of landscape painting, a pupil and friend of Thomas Cole, the movement's leader, and an important contributor to Luminism. At his peak during the mid-Victorian Age, he was one of the most famous modern artists in the United States, but tastes changed, and by the time he died he was largely forgotten.

In the spring and autumn seasons, Frederic Edwin Church was known to travel extensively by foot, collecting sketches he would later turn into paintings in winter. As one of the most prominent figures in the Hudson River School of American landscape painters, Church captured the phenomena of his natural surroundings, such as waterfalls, rainbows, sunsets, and volcanoes, in massive dimensions with astounding verisimilitude.

During early study under landscape painter Thomas Cole, Church developed his eye by joining Cole in sketching the Catskill and Berkshire Mountains. Upon establishing his own studio in New York, Church traveled extensively; inspired by the writings of Prussian explorer Alexander Von Humboldt, he traversed South America, and later traveled to the North Atlantic to sketch icebergs, Jamaica to capture the tropics, and Palestine to retrace Jesus’s footsteps.