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Frederic Edwin Church ( 1826 - 1900 )  Category ( Artists ) [suggest a correction]
 

Frederic Edwin ChurchFrederic Edwin Church was a central figure in the Hudson River School of American landscape painting. Born into a wealthy Connecticut family who could afford to indulge their son’s interest in art, Church began his training and career at an early age. When he was eighteen years old he became the pupil of artist Thomas Cole. By 1848 he sold his first major work and began working professionally full time. Though he taught painting to a number of students (his first was the artist William James Stillman) during his lifetime, Church was most interested in travel to domestic and exotic locales to derive inspiration for his work.

Early in his career he would travel in New York, often by foot, from spring to autumn, sketching and taking notes as he went, and then return by winter to paint and then sell his work. During the 1850s he traveled to South America, at the expense of Cyrus West Field. The businessman hired Church to capture the beauty and potential of South America in order to lure other businessmen to invest in Field’s ventures there. Church remained in South America for two years. Upon his return he completed one of his most famous works, The Heart of the Andes (1859), which is now part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection. The painting created a good deal of excitement upon its unveiling, and the public was charged admission to sit and gaze upon the highly detailed work, often with the use of opera glasses. Church finally sold the painting for $10,000, which was the highest price ever paid for a work by a living American artist up to that time.

Church showed his paintings each year at the National Academy of Design exhibitions and other prominent art clubs, along with Thomas Cole, Asher Brown Durand, and others. Their work was popular with critics and collectors, and their collective work became known as the Hudson River School. Church claimed that the focus of his work was not only visual, but spiritual as well. As a painter of the Romantic period, much of his work displays the Romantic qualities of the picturesque and the sublime.

In 1860 Church married Isabel Carnes and settled on a farm in Hudson, New York. The couple’s first two children died tragically from diphtheria, but later had four children who survived. The family enjoyed traveling abroad, where Church continued to sketch and paint familiar and exotic scenery. In 1870 he began work on Olana, a uniquely designed castle and home that incorporated numerous ideas and architectural motifs Church observed in his travels. The home, now a museum, is located in New York State and is open to the public.

Image: Frederic Edwin Church, between 1855 and 1865.


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