Heart of the Hudson - Frederic Edward Church, National Gallery, Washington, D.C

National Review, March 5, 1990 by James Gardner

LITTLE OR NOTHING in our experience approximates the thoroughly american and thoroughly extinct nineteenth-century tradition of "Great Painting." When our ancestors invoked this term, they meant something very specific. They referred to the exhibition of a single large canvas, usually a minutely detailed landscape suffused with moral sentiment, which the general public, inspired by Barnumesque hooplah, eagerly paid its hard- earned pennies to see.

The grandest of the Great Paintings of the nineteenth century was undoubtedly Frederic Edwin Church's Heart of the Andes, an expansive vista of tropical scenery. It was first exhibited in New York's Tenth Street Studio Building in 1859, the year of Darwin's Origin of Species and Wagner's Tristan. A photograph preserves for us the installation's appearance. Separated from an adoring public by a wooden railing, the picture was almost overwhelmed by a massive, ornate oak frame whose topmost part was draped in cascading folds of shagged and tasseled vermilion velvet. Above, in a canopied cartouche, were portraits of our first three Presidents. Surrounded by imported palms in a dramatically darkened room, the painting could be seen only by gaslight. Some visitors strained their eyes to read pamphlets that pious churchmen had written about the painting, and that were being hawked in the gallery. Others gazed through opera-glasses and metal tubes and thought they were really in the Andes. For seven weeks a stream of visitors crowded into the cramped and overheated chamber, and by the end of it all, Church had become a wealthy man.

By good fortune, something of the same drama can now be found at the huge Church retrospective at the National Gallery in Washington. The Heart of the Andes forms the centerpiece of the show, and the organizers have gone to some lengths to simulate its original installation. This painting, over five feet high and ten feet across, is magical in its effect. The viewer, held illogically aloft, seems to float through the warm, humid air, fanned by the fine mist that rises from the far-off waterfall. Amid an incalculable wealth of details, he notices a humble native in the left foreground, kneeling before a rustic cross. Diverted to far right by an unlikely flash of violets, the viewer is next enticed into an ancient forest, whose green glooms are relieved here and there by spots of sunlight. Emerging from these depths, he glides over white waterfalls and through the lush maze of foothills and valleys, into layers of cloud, until he finds himself at last upon a snowcapped pinnacle.

Heart of the Andes was only one of many successes in the career of Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900). Church's career began under the tutelage of the sweet if imperfect master of landscapes, Thomas Cole. Like Cole, Church wanted only one thing in his life, to be a painter of nature. He reached maturity at the precise moment when landscape painting was at its zenith, during the glory days of Manifest Destiny and of the Hudson River School, the first indigenous American art movement. Patriotic sentiment was at such a fever pitch just then that one had no need of Muses. Struggling to distinguish themselves from their European forebears, our artists reveled in the thrilling bigness of North American nature. Sweeping plains, massive mountain ranges, and mighty rivers were conscripted into the democratic project, in rejection of the corseted and implicitly aristocratic daintiness of the Old World. Such yearnings were never exemplified better than in Church's paintings.

The Church would soon reject the delicate, childlike poetry that was Cole's most conspicuous grace, though he would soon outstrip his master in the conception of the whole and in the detailing of the parts of his landscapes, his early works nevertheless betray Cole's influence. They bear the marks of mainstream romanticism, which could never look upon nature without seeing flattering reflections of itself. The restrained autumnal tones of Scene of the Catskill Creek (1847), wherein a lone rowboat idles over the glassy water at earliest morning, recall the rhetoric of poets like William Cullen Bryant. Every stroke in the painting makes its parsonical point.

Soon after Cole's death in 1848, however, Church evolved a new manner, inspired by the sharp and detailed naturalism of recent European developments like daguerreotypes, Biedermeier portraiture, and pre-Raphaelite landscapes. Though John Ruskin, whose manifesto Modern Painters was the pre-eminent document of this fashion, rarely liked Church's paintings (or indeed anything else), his insistence on fidelity to nature was never heeded more assiduously than by the young American. Above the Clouds at Sunrise has stripped away the last remaining genteelness of his earlier style. Amid the shrill clash of pinks and mauves, pine trees violently pierce the early mists to fling the viewer's attention away from the center up into orange clouds.

Yet even at his most photographic, Church needed to find some reflection of human preoccupation in an impersonal nature. Inspired by the writings of Baron Humboldt, the leading naturalist of the early nineteenth century, Church was confident of a superior and benign order that stamped itself upon every tree, rock, and blade of grass. Wherever he roamed in his career, whether amid the sounding cataracts of Niagara Falls, the rain-forests of South America, or the glaciers of the Far North, Church found abundant confirmation that this was so. The Icebergs speaks to us about keeping the faith amid total desolation. The sun that shines over the tumult of the sea in Coast Scene, Mount Desert symbolizes the endurance of God in spite of all earthly adversity. The rainbow that arcs across the sky in Rainy Season in the Tropics tells of God's goodness and promises redemption.