Frederic Edwin Church

1826 - 1900 • American • Painter • Hudson River School

"We were soon among the most terrible crags and yawning chasms I ever saw-jagged black rocks piled up in awful grandeur-we were lost in amazement. And yet as we progressed they became still more terrible." - Frederic Edwin Church

A student and brilliant disciple of COLE, Church went with his mentor on sketching rambles in New York's Catskill Mountains, where Cole had his studio in the 1840s. Church responded to the spiritualism of the TRANSCENDENTALIST movement and to the prosperous PATRONS who wanted patriotic landscapes charged with the American doctrine of Manifest Destiny (see COLE). Many of them were financially as well as philosophically invested in the nation's march westward. Church painted landscapes with sunsets that fulfilled the most ardent cravings for the SUBLIME. With his "Great Pictures"showing a single work for the price of admission-he enjoyed box-office success: The majestic Niagara (1857) earned him $4,500, a great sum for the time. Church traveled to the North Atlantic to paint Icebergs (1861); to South America to paint a volcano, Cotopaxi (1862); and to the Near East in 1867 to follow the path Jesus had trodden. "After years of seeking the wild, the new, and the virginal in South America and elsewhere, he was now plunging into the most aged, history-laden put of the world,'' the historian John Davis writes. ''His journey east was essentially a search for origins ... " The search was propelled by Charles Darwin's The Origin of the Species (1859) and Church's need to reconcile his religious sentiments with post-Darwinian science, which removed God from the landscape. In the passage quoted above, from a letter to a friend, Church describes his approach to the El Khasne at Petra, which he painted in 1874, five years after his return home. He entered Petra via a narrow passage through cliffs that rose 300 feet on either side of him-thought to be the split left in the rock by the rod of Moses. The cliffs darkly framed his view of El Khasne ("the Treasury"), and this is the view that he painted. El Khasne is one of the paintings that convince Davis that Church did find the spiritual comfort he sought while on his quasi-scientific, archaeological expedition.