Who is Frederic Church?

In the 19th century, Frederic Edwin Church became the most famous artist in the United States, best known for his adventurous travels and bold paintings of the natural world. Born in Hartford Connecticut in 1826, the gifted Frederic Church decided at a young age that he wanted to become an artist. The art collector Daniel Wadsworth persuaded the landscape painter Thomas Cole to accept Church as his pupil. In 1844, 18-year-old Frederic went to study with Cole in Catskill, New York–on the banks of the Hudson River–and accompanied him on sketching excursions in the nearby Catskill Mountains. Cole noted that Church had “the finest eye for drawing in the world.” In 1848, at age 22, Church became the youngest artist to be elected to the National Academy of Design.

Frederic Church established a studio in New York City and quickly gained a reputation for expansive New England views that synthesized intensive plein-air studies into vivid compositions. In 1857, Church rose to national and international prominence with his seven-foot-wide panoramic painting, Niagara, which stunned spectators throughout the country and in Great Britain. One critic famously wrote: “this is Niagara, with the roar left out!”

By this time, Church had also become enraptured with the work of the renowned naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt. Humboldt implored artists to travel and capture majesty of the natural world, particularly in South America. In 1853, Church made the first of two expeditions following in Humboldt’s footsteps through the Andean region. His resulting 1859 masterpiece, The Heart of the Andes, is a huge 10-foot painting, that he exhibited in dramatic fashion. It was the blockbuster art event of the decade and stunned audiences in New York City and around the country. His friend Mark Twain wrote: “You will never get tired of looking at the picture,” and a New York paper wrote: “A new picture by Mr. Church is as considerable an event in the world of art as a new novel by Victor Hugo, or a new poem by Tennyson would be in the literary world.”

It was during the exhibition of The Heart of the Andes that Frederic met Isabel Carnes. They married in 1860 and purchased a hillside farm in Hudson NY, directly across the Hudson River from the home of his late teacher, Thomas Cole. This property formed the seed of his greatest artistic endeavor, Olana.

Church’s artistic appetite for the natural world brought him to the North Atlantic between Labrador and Newfoundland to sketch icebergs. 1865, Frederic and Isabel traveled to Jamaica, which led to some of Church’s most vivid oil studies of botanical growth and tropical light. In 1867, Church and his family embarked on an Old World painting pilgrimage to the Alps, Rome, Athens, and the Eastern Mediterranean, including Damascus, Jerusalem and Petra. When Church returned from this voyage, another visionary series of paintings emerged, and his artistic work began to extend beyond the canvas to the design of Olana’s 250-acre landscape.

During this period, Church also accepted the role of Parks Commissioner in New York City’s Central Park and became a founding trustee of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Church also helped to establish a campaign to create a public park along the American and Canadian borders of Niagara Falls, an iconic landscape challenged by increased 19th-century industrialization. With Frederick Law Olmsted, Calvert Vaux, and others, the artist Frederic Church advocated for the first State Park in New York, the Niagara Reservation, a forerunner to the National Parks Movement.