![]() This style attempted to capture the wild realism of an unsettled America that was quickly disappearing, and the feelings of discovery and appreciation for natural beauty. The paintings were characterized by their focus on traditional American pastoral settings, especially the Catskill Mountains, and their romantic qualities. Cole, along with his friend Asher Durand, started this school in New York it was the first well-acknowledged American artistic movement. Both Cole and Church were devout Protestants and the latter's beliefs played a role in his paintings especially his early canvases. The Hudson River School was established by the British Thomas Cole when he moved to America and started painting landscapes, mostly of mountains and other traditional American scenes. Soon after, he sold his first major work to Hartford's Wadsworth Athenaeum.Ĭhurch was the product of the second generation of the Hudson River School and the pupil of Thomas Cole, the school’s founder. ![]() In May 1849, Church was elected as the youngest Associate of the National Academy of Design and was promoted to Academician the following year. At eighteen years of age, Church became the pupil of Thomas Cole in Catskill, New York after Daniel Wadsworth, a family neighbor and founder of the Wadsworth Athenaeum, introduced the two. The family's wealth allowed Frederic Church to pursue his interest in art from a very early age. Joseph later became an official and a director of The Aetna Life Insurance Company. Joseph, in turn, was the son of Samuel Church, who founded the first paper mill in Lee, Massachusetts in the Berkshires. ![]() The family's wealth came from Church's father, a silversmith and watchmaker in Hartford, Connecticut. Church was the son of Eliza (née Janes) and Joseph Church. In his later years, Church painted classical Mediterranean and Middle Eastern scenes and cityscapes.įrederic Edwin Church was a direct descendant of Richard Church, who was a Puritan pioneer from England who accompanied Thomas Hooker on the original journey through the wilderness from Massachusetts to what would become Hartford, Connecticut. Church's paintings put an emphasis on light and a Romantic respect for natural detail. He was a central figure in the Hudson River School of American landscape painters, perhaps best known for painting large panoramic landscapes, often depicting mountains, waterfalls, and sunsets, but also sometimes depicting dramatic natural phenomena that he saw during his travels to the Arctic and Central and South America. While on view in the U.S., Church’s painting was titled The North, and all exhibition proceeds were donated the Union’s Patriotic Fund (today’s Red Cross).Frederic Edwin Church (– April 7, 1900) was an American landscape painter born in Hartford, Connecticut. Twelve days after the attack on Fort Sumter ignited the American Civil War, The Icebergs debuted in New York on April 24, 1861. The process took him less than six months, and The Icebergs was first exhibited in 1861. His goal was to capture both the essence of his experiences among icebergs and the other-worldly sense of the Arctic environment, drawn from explorers’ written accounts and contemporary reports. ![]() As with his earlier blockbuster landscape, The Heart of the Andes (1859, Metropolitan Museum of Art), he paired his on-site observations with his imagination. He spent several weeks on a sixty-five ton schooner and used a small rowboat to venture over the deadly waters and closely study the forms and colors of icebergs in the Arctic landscape.Īfter returning to his New York City studio, Church relied on nearly one hundred pencil and oil sketches to create a large-scale painting of icebergs. In 1859, Church chartered a month long expedition in the North Atlantic, off the Canadian coasts of Newfoundland and Labrador. Yet in reality, the scene is an inhospitable place filled with danger, as the broken mast in the foreground indicates. The seductively inviting colors, glowing subterranean light, and glossy, tactile surfaces of the icebergs attract the viewer’s eye. The Icebergs is a superb example of Frederic Edwin Church’s technical skill and clever marketing. Frederic Edwin Church, Drawing, Floating Iceberg, June or July 1859 Brush and oil, graphite on paperboard, 18.8 x 37.5 cm (7 3/8 x 14 3/4 in.) Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum
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