Frederic Church
1826 - 1900

One of the key instruments involved in forging a sense of an American self after the establishment of the United States would be a group of artists collectively known as the Hudson River School . The Hudson River School was an American landscape movement which began in 1825 and achieved the height of its popularity from 1840 to 1870. The early years of the school were dominated by artists who lived and worked in New York , including its founder Thomas Cole. These artists shared a common style, technique, and subject – the Hudson River and the Catskills and Adirondacks that bordered it. Cole's premature death was a blow, but one of his staunchest disciples was ready to step into his place as a leader among the younger Hudson River painters –Frederic Church.

Born to a wealthy Connecticut family in 1826, Church was provided with extensive artistic training plus the means to travel and support his artistic and social pursuits. While Jasper Cropsey and one or two others continued to paint idealized vistas of the Hudson River Valley and Catskill Mountains, Church, Moran, Bierstadt and the other later members of the “School” began exploring the American West, creating huge panoramic landscapes of the Rockies and the Grand Canyon. Frederic Church, like Cole before him, religiously accepted Ruskin's dictum that landscape painting should be, “the thoughtful and passionate representation of the physical conditions appointed for human existence”. However, his work, like that of other members of his generation, looked less to the neo-Platonic transformation of landscape that revealed the hand of God than to a celebration of the might and majesty of Manifest Destiny claiming the grandeur of the American land. Landscape became a political statement as much as an art form. In 1864, art critic James Jackson Jarvis declared in The Art-Idea , “The thoroughly American branch of painting, based upon the facts and tastes of the country and people is . . . landscape”.

This second wave of artists, like the first, was painting a landscape that was already vanishing under the tide of civilization. As early as the 1830's, Alexis de Tocqueville had observed:

It is the consciousness of destruction, or quick and inevitable change, that gives such a touching beauty to the solitudes of America . One sees them with a sort of melancholy pleasure; one is in some sort of a hurry to admire them.

But the Western paintings of these later Hudson River School artists, particularly of scenic venues like the Yosemite Valley and Yellowstone would be instrumental in establishing a national park system that preserved at least some of the natural beauty they celebrated.

By the 1860s, the Hudson River artists found their fame spreading even to Europe . Church's “Niagara” was hailed throughout the continent and had a tremendous success on exhibition in London . As their fame grew, so it seemed did the size and price of their paintings. “Niagara” was over three feet high and seven feet wide while Church's “The Heart of the Andes ” was over ten feet wide. The prices for these paintings were equally huge for their time, usually about $25,000, an enormous price indeed when one considers that these were 1870s dollars. Church built a huge and apparently eternally redesigned villa named Olana in Hudson , New York as well as summer homes in Maine and Mexico to share with his wife and four surviving children.

But with the large prices also came the first hints of decline. Some critics and audiences complained that the artists were putting too much on canvases that were too large. Tastes began, yet again, to change. Church, who had risen the highest, had the farthest to fall and was doomed to spend the last twenty years of his life watching his work being either ignored or denigrated. When he died in 1900, the work of the Hudson River School had been completely eclipsed.

However, as often happens, later evaluations have restored the luster of these works and, by the 1970s, the artistic reputations of the Hudson River School painters had been restored. In 1979 Church's “The Icebergs” sold at auction for a phenomenal $2.5 million and the value of his works continues to grow today.

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