Displaying items by tag: Frederic Edwin Church

Maine Sublime: Frederic Edwin Church’s Landscapes of Mount Desert and Mount Katahdin will open on June 9, 2013 at Olana in Hudson, NY. Olana State Historic Site was the home of Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900), a major figure in the Hudson River School, and includes the artist’s studio. The villa is a mixture of Victorian, Persian, and Moorish styles and overlooks the Hudson River valley, the Catskill Mountains, and the Taconic Ridge.

The upcoming exhibition focuses on the 50-year period during which Church traveled and painted landscapes of Maine. Maine Sublime presents 10 oil and 13 pencil sketches from Olana’s collection and many of works will be on public view for the first time. The show will include loans from the Portland Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and two private collections.

Church first visited Maine in 1850 and spent six weeks on Mount Desert. In 1852, Church explored the Mount Katahdin region and in the coming decades he would continue to visit and be captivated by Maine’s natural beauty. The plein-air sketch Wood Interior Near Mount Katahdin (circa 1877) is one of the works that has never been on public view but will be part of the upcoming exhibition.

Maine Sublime will be on view at Olana through October 31, 2013. The exhibition will then be on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art through the summer of 2014.

This year marks the sesquicentennial of the fall of Fort Sumter and the start of the American Civil War (1861-1865). Oddly, the war coincided with the richest and most successful phase of the career of America’s most renowned nineteenth-century landscape painter, Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900).

Born into the family of an affluent businessman in Hartford, Connecticut, Church cultivated inborn sympathies for art and science, first as the prodigious student of Hudson River School founder Thomas Cole (1801-1848), then as a devotee of the natural history texts of Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859), the German naturalist who explored the equatorial New World at the turn of the nineteenth century. In 1853 and in 1857, Church followed the trail of Humboldt in Colombia and Ecuador. Back in his New York City studio, he fashioned such monumental vistas as The Heart of the Andes (1859; Metropolitan Museum of Art), from a small preparatory study (Fig. 1) based on sketches. Twelve thousand people paid an admission fee to see the dramatically framed and lit painting when it was first shown. Not content with the natural variety he found at the equator, Church hired a boat in 1859 and journeyed to near the Arctic Circle. From his sketches and drawings (Fig. 2) he produced on his return The Icebergs (1861; Dallas Museum of Fine Arts). To augment his income, Church often had his major works reproduced as engravings, such as the color lithograph of The Icebergs.

“Now for Jamaica . . . the scenery is superb,” Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900) remarked when he traveled to Jamaica in May of 1865 in search of new tropical material and respite.1 Church was an established artist, known for his monumental landscapes of New World wonders, when in March 1865, he and his wife, Isabel, lost their two children, three-year-old Herbert and five-month-old Emma, in a diphtheria epidemic. To escape from reminders of their tragedy, Church took his wife to Jamaica, where, during their five month retreat, the Blue Mountains and surrounding verdure provided ample inspiration for the artist (Fig. 1).