A beautiful hand: throug his scientifically detailed canvases, Frederic E. Church transported the Tropics to the temperate zone

We know intuitively when an artist has rendered a human body poorly, when the proportions are wrong or a line is off. But few people are perturbed by an improperly painted plant or tree (which is why vegetation is a great confidence builder for art students). Yet each species has a genetic code that programs its branching patterns, the shape and distribution of its leaves, the way damaged parts heal. A great landscape artist understands the regularities (and irregularities) of growth and decay and is able to convey them precisely. One who did so was the American master Frederic E. Church (1826-1900), a painter well read in both science and art theory. As a botanist who has traveled in some of the same regions that Church did, I am particularly captivated by the fidelity to nature displayed in his canvases, even though their main intent, theme, or symbolism may lie elsewhere.

Born in Hartford to a long-established tribe of Connecticut Yankees, Church was a student of the Romantic landscape artist Thomas Cole, one of the founders of the Hudson River school. By the age of twenty-four, Church had already been elected to the National Academy of Design, on the strength of his painting West Rock, New Haven. From his home base in New York City, he traveled to areas of natural beauty--Virginia, Kentucky, Vermont, the Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts, the White Mountains of New Hampshire, the wilds of Maine--to sketch and gather ideas. His careful observation of the details of nature is evident in his early work, and the practiced eye can easily distinguish his spruces from his hemlocks. But it was in the Tropics that Church met, and mastered, his greatest challenge: conveying the mystique of the region's flora and geography to those who would never directly experience its beauty.

The nineteenth century was a time of exploration and analysis, as scientists cataloged nature's species and sought to decipher her riddles. Information about the Tropics was conveyed, through lectures or the printed word, by the few who had penetrated "the torrid zone" Only with the popularization of lithography and, later, photography could science begin to offer a glimpse of this world to the masses. (I even think back to my own childhood, when my impressions of the Tropics were shaped mostly by Johnny Weismuller as Tarzan, pushing through rented foliage on a Hollywood lot.)

Until his fame was eclipsed by Darwin's, perhaps the preeminent scientist of the nineteenth century was Alexander yon Humboldt (1769-1859), a German who traveled extensively in South America and Mexico. His observations on the distribution of vegetation were to form the basis of the science of phytogeography, and his books, such as Cosmos: A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe (published in five volumes beginning in 1845), were widely read and discussed. Unlike Darwin, von Humboldt viewed nature as an expression of divine order--an order that could be revealed through the work of the landscape artist. Church must have devoured passages of Cosmos as if its author were speaking directly to him:

   Are we not justified in hoping that landscape painting will flourish with a
   new and hitherto unknown brilliancy when artists of merit shall more
   frequently pass the narrow limits of the Mediterranean, and when they shall
   be enabled, far in the interior of continents, in the humid mountain
   valleys of the tropical world, to seize, with the genuine freshness of a
   pure and youthful spirit, on the true image of the varied forms of nature?

Von Humboldt even suggested strategies for how to proceed with the collection of visual data:

   Colored sketches, taken directly from nature, are the only means by which
   the artist, on his return, may reproduce the character of distant regions
   in more elaborately finished pictures; and this object will be the more
   fully attained where the painter has, at the same time, drawn or painted
   directly from nature a large number of separate studies of the foliage of
   trees; of leafy, flowering, or fruit-bearing stems; of prostrate trunks,
   overgrown with Pothos and Orchideae; of rocks and of portions of the shore,
   and the soil of the forest. The possession of such correctly-drawn and
   well-proportioned sketches will enable the artist to dispense with all the
   deceptive aid of hothouse forms and so-called botanical delineations.

To a temperate-world New Englander who had already surveyed the forests of the eastern United States, von Humboldt's call must have sounded like a summons to Eden. And although Church was on his way to being considered America's foremost landscape painter, others were competing with him in his usual territory. What better way to stay ahead of the pack than to head to the Tropics? In 1853 Church ventured to South America, putting ashore at Barranquilla, New Granada (now Colombia), and then proceeding by steamer up the Magdalena River into the interior.

Over the course of the next five months, Church and his traveling companion, Cyrus Field (a boyhood friend and Massachusetts paper merchant who later was instrumental in the laying of the first Atlantic cable), retraced von Humboldt's route. They journeyed from the lowland tropical forests on the northern Caribbean coast to the cold, high grasslands of the Andes and down to the lowland forests of Ecuador on the Pacific coast, losing themselves, at times literally and at times artistically, in the views of "unparalleled magnificence." Church experienced the thrill of finding beauty and power that few knew existed, and as an artist he must have felt as though he were interpreting these views and organisms for the first time. Von Humboldt had implored artists to reveal the hidden spirituality in nature, and Church, raised by staunchly Christian parents, was receptive to illuminating the works of an omnipotent and loving God on canvas. His art was forever changed.