The Artist Who Made America Look Like a Promised Land
In Curzio Malaparte’s perverse and irksome novel “The Skin,” an American Army officer stationed in a devastated southern Italy in 1943 exclaims, “Ah Europe! What an extraordinary place it is. I need Europe, to make me conscious of being an American.” The officer—“an American in the noblest sense of the word,” a man with a “delicacy of feeling” prone to blushing at the sight of the degradation all around him—seems to be talking about European culture, of which he is in awe. But he is also using Europe’s moment of deepest ignominy as an excuse to believe in American innocence.
Europe served a similar function in nineteenth-century America. The Continent had generations of infamy to draw on. It had artists like Francisco Goya and Hieronymus Bosch. It had cities like Rome, about which James Salter once wrote, “Nothing so often betrayed could retain a shred of illusion.” The French Revolution, coming so soon after America’s successful War of Independence, had produced first the Terror and then a war of conquest that culminated in humiliating defeat. France lurched from republic to dictatorship to empire before cycling back through absolute monarchy, constitutional monarchy, Second Republic, and Second Empire. The United States, searching for self-definition but loath to lose its illusions—its innocence—needed all of this as a counterpoint.
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Gifted, worldly, and widely loved, Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900) was the emblematic artist of the middle decades of America’s nineteenth century. A leading figure of the so-called Hudson River School, he painted panoramic landscapes of astonishing detail, grandeur, and moral ambition. Combining dramatic mountains, lush tropical forests, and awe-inspiring geological formations under relentlessly epic skies, he portrayed these environments as richly interconnected, stirring in themselves but also part of something larger: a bigger feeling, a greater idea.
Mark Twain, a repeat visitor to Church’s most celebrated painting, “The Heart of the Andes” (1859), as it toured the U.S., wrote to his brother that a “third visit will find your brain gasping and straining with futile efforts to take all the wonder in.” You will struggle to understand, he continued, “how such a miracle could have been conceived and executed by human brain and human hands.” Landscape painters gain cultural centrality by showing a nation’s territory to itself. Church did for America what John Constable and J. M. W. Turner had done for Britain. Like Turner, Church also travelled far beyond the shores of his homeland. But whatever he painted, whether Andean volcanoes, Arctic icebergs, or the Athenian Parthenon, he was always involved in the difficult project of American self-definition.
Constable and Turner remain central to British identity today, their paintings reproduced on coffee mugs and fridge magnets; Church’s position in American culture is more precarious. Did he show us the United States or something we struggle to recognize—either because it still relied too heavily on Europe or because the United States he depicted was too wrapped up in a vulgar display of its own innocence? The two-hundredth anniversary of Church’s birth is being marked this year by a range of publications and exhibitions. “Frederic Church: Global Artist” (Yale), the title of an illustrated collection of essays edited by Tim Barringer, Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser, and Jennifer Raab, feels apt when you understand Church as an American looking to the world for definition. The essays discuss his relationships with the Ottoman Empire, Colombia, and Rome, and consider his legacy in the context of Indigenous and settler histories, slavery, science, ecology, and religion. Perhaps even more apt, however, is the title of a lively new biography of the artist by Victoria Johnson, “Glorious Country: How the Artist Frederic Church Brought the World to America and America to the World” (Scribner), the “glorious country” in question being America.
Church’s credentials as America’s national artist were impeccable. Born fifty years after the birth of his nation, he was the direct descendant of an early Puritan pioneer. His father ran a successful silver and jewelry business, and later served as a director of an insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut. To go with his ancestral claims, Church, who had been drawing obsessively since early childhood, also inherited an artistic mantle. At eighteen, he became the only student of Thomas Cole. Though born in Lancashire, England, Cole moved to the United States while still a teen-ager and became his adopted nation’s preëminent painter-interpreter. The precocious Church was embraced by the Cole household at a farm, known as Cedar Grove, in Catskill. While other artists of ambition sailed for Europe, Cole’s protégé was perfectly satisfied sketching along the Hudson.
Cole’s canvases were synthetic constructions teeming with homilies. He saw America as an Arcadia destined for corruption by populist forces, personified by Andrew Jackson. “We are still in Eden,” he told a New York audience in 1835. “The wall that shuts us out of the garden is our own ignorance and folly.” The changes he witnessed in America, including railway expansion, the adoption of steam power, and worsening pollution, convinced Cole that life’s natural rhythms were accelerating out of control. “The Course of Empire,” a series of allegorical paintings he began in 1833, depicted American destiny in terms laid out by Edward Gibbon in “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.”
Cole’s works were as notable for what they omitted as for what they showed. To paint an 1827 view of the Hudson River Valley from the Catskills, he moved aside a mountain blocking the vista, and edited out a hotel and a guardrail at a scenic lookout. (As Diana Seave Greenwald writes in “Frederic Church: Global Artist,” when Church visited the Holy Land forty years later, he also chose to edit out or marginalize the obvious—that the territory was Muslim and part of the Ottoman Empire—preferring to focus on the landscape’s links with its Greco-Roman and Crusader past.) But Cole’s authority extended beyond his canvases; he was also doing his part to create the artistic world from which the young Frederic Church would so auspiciously emerge. He helped found the National Academy of Design, in New York, the year before Church was born. He arranged for two small landscapes by Church, then just shy of nineteen years old, to be exhibited at the academy’s prestigious spring show; they were well received, and Church was off and running. He was, according to a friend, “fortune’s favorite from the beginning.”
Church’s first important painting, completed in 1846, was “Hooker and Company Journeying Through the Wilderness from Plymouth to Hartford, in 1636,” which depicts early Pilgrims (among them his ancestor Richard Church) seeking asylum from the Bay Colony government in Boston. The wooded, well-irrigated landscape, gilded by the light of the gloaming, is presented as a promised land. The painting may be the first appearance in art of the American doctrine of Manifest Destiny, a term coined the year before by the newspaperman and diplomat John O’Sullivan. Manifest Destiny entailed not just westward expansion but the spread of liberty and democracy, which O’Sullivan believed was nothing less than “Christianity in its earthly aspect.” Abraham Lincoln was wary of the doctrine, perceiving that any such notion of divine inevitability could be used to justify land grabs and war.
Church was not inclined to Cole’s pessimism. Where his teacher favored generalized nature, Church moved gradually toward greater specificity and empiricism, even as he continued to use landscape to explore ideas of liberty and American identity. When Church moved to New York, in 1847, he aroused interest as the only student of the famous Thomas Cole. Most of his early sales were to the committee of the National Academy’s rival organization, the Art-Union. Established in 1839, the Art-Union sought to connect New York’s art world with a national audience through a subscription system and an annual lottery. Church did not, however, neglect the National Academy, and in 1849—in the midst of bloody riots pitting nativists against immigrants and New York’s working class against the wealthy—he was promoted to full academician status. Three years later, his “New England Scenery,” which transposes the pastoral picturesque of the French artists Claude and Poussin to New England, was sold for thirteen hundred dollars, the highest price then paid for an American painting.
Church’s combination of talent, affability, and fine manners eased his way into New York’s élite, sometimes inspiring envy among his painter friends. (He “never knew what poverty was,” his friend Worthington Whittredge noted.) At the Century Association, a men’s club for artists and wealthy patrons (Twain called it “the most unspeakably respectable club in the United States”), he met with Cyrus Field, a merchant about to become famous for laying a telegraph cable across the Atlantic Ocean. In 1851, Church was travelling with Field and his wife, Mary, in Virginia when he first encountered the slave-owning American South.
Tensions over slavery were then ratcheting up everywhere. “There is infamy in the air,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote after a fugitive from slavery was brutally captured in Boston; the shame of complicity, he added, “robs the landscape of beauty, and takes the sunshine out of every hour.” Church and the Fields stayed at Shirley, a plantation just southeast of Richmond. Their host, Hill Carter, “considered himself an enlightened and benevolent man,” Victoria Johnson writes; he “occasionally sold children away from their parents, but no more often, he insisted, than he felt absolutely necessary.” During their visit, the first installment of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” appeared in a Washington, D.C., newspaper. At Field’s urging, Church painted a view of Virginia’s Natural Bridge, the renowned geological formation alluded to in “Moby-Dick.”
As a national icon, the Natural Bridge served as a quiet, Emersonian rebuke to Europe’s militaristic triumphal arches, reinforcing the naturalness of American democracy. Church depicted the high arch, which sits on land once owned by Thomas Jefferson, with scientific precision yet in a romantic, golden light. He signalled his support for racial equality by painting a Black man, picked out by light in the foreground shadows, standing while speaking to a seated white woman, his gestures suggesting pedagogical intent.
Church’s landscapes themselves had pedagogical intent, and the lessons were not just scientific but ethical, spiritual, patriotic. This intent aligned with the nation’s urgent emphasis on education as a defense against mob rule. It aligned, too, with the advice set out in Emerson’s rhapsodic 1836 essay “Nature,” which posited the natural world as an arena for moral instruction. Channelling Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “Emile, or On Education,” Emerson stressed not just self-reliance but an innocent, childlike way of living, free from the “corruptions” of tradition. The influence on American culture of Emerson’s rallying cry—“Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?”—is hard to overestimate.
When Church travelled to the Andes, first in 1853 and again in 1857 (Field accompanied him on the initial trip and financed both), he was seeking just such an “original relation.” But his epic trip wasn’t itself original—it was in direct emulation of Alexander von Humboldt, the Prussian naturalist and explorer, who, between 1799 and 1804, had traversed thousands of miles in South and Central America. In his treatise “Cosmos” and in other writings, Humboldt presented the world as a giant “interlaced and interwoven” organism in ways that spoke powerfully to Emerson and Henry David Thoreau and still resonate today. He also extolled landscape painting as one of the highest expressions of a love of nature. Church set out to deliver on Humboldt’s insight. Johnson’s descriptions of his journeys are among the most exciting parts of her biography:
The most important painting to emerge from that first trip, “The Andes of Ecuador,” has a low, centered sun irradiating a vast landscape framed at left by a palm tree and at right by a waterfall. In the distance, stretching the vista almost to its breaking point, are two snowcapped volcanoes. The painting was seen by Thoreau when it went on display at the Boston Athenaeum and was purchased by William Henry Osborn, a young railroad executive with whose family Church would become lastingly close.
Church felt it vital to the success of his pictures—and perhaps, by extension, to American democracy—that people trusted in the accuracy of what he showed them. The thousands who came to see his 1857 painting of Niagara Falls, first in the United States and then in Britain, were astounded by its immense scale and unique perspective. As a performance of attentive observation, it seemed unprecedented. Artists before Church found it all but impossible to “freeze” the movements of water, but in Church’s hands, as the art critic Robert Hughes wrote, “not a wavelet or an eddy fails to play its part in a narrative of factual cause and effect.”
Church’s second, shorter trip to the Andes led to the creation of his masterpiece. The profusion of precisely rendered detail in “The Heart of the Andes” is mesmerizing, and a reminder of the promiscuous relations, in those years, between science and Romanticism. Just as Emerson had written that “every appearance in nature corresponds to some state of the mind,” Church made sure, as the art historian Rebecca Bedell has said of the painting, that “almost every pictorial detail has its counterpart in Humboldt’s words.”
And yet “The Heart of the Andes” is not a faithful rendering of a particular view. It’s a composite, contrived in the studio, informed by the scores of sketches and color notations Church had made while travelling. Like a teacher guiding a child, the work leads the eye step-by-step from the lower right to the upper left. In the foreground is a lushly forested valley with a river and a waterfall and two pilgrims before a wayside cross. In the middle distance is a human settlement, then a band of golden grasslands, then the arid lower slopes of the Cordilleras, and finally the snowy peaks, including the grand dome of Chimborazo.
Seven decades or so earlier, the Scottish naturalist James Hutton had argued that geological processes played out gradually over previously unimagined periods of time. His discovery of what John McPhee later termed “deep time” seemed to pulverize any claims to human significance. But Church, undeterred, was drawn to the idea that those processes offered lessons in destruction and renewal which could be applied to a nation teetering on civil war. In a forty-three-page guide to “The Heart of the Andes,” Church’s friend Theodore Winthrop found “proofs everywhere of change, building, razing, upheaval, sinking, and deliberate crumbling away.” But he also saw evidence of how “new ruin restores the strong lines that old ruin weakened.”
Church wanted to help restore America’s “strong lines,” which he thought of as republican, abolitionist, Christian, and scientific. Like Humboldt, he believed that science could be reconciled with religion. But when Charles Darwin published “On the Origin of Species,” in 1859, a new view of life threatened to snuff out Humboldt’s idea of a benevolent “harmony, blending together all created things,” and replace it with a Hobbesian vision of randomness, conflict, and opportunism. Darwin’s theory did not preclude social coöperation or progress, but it undermined the idea that there was any deeper purpose to life than survival. Church, for all his scientific curiosity, was not moved to convert Darwinism into pictorial rhetoric. “I wish science would take a holiday for ten years so I could catch up,” he wrote near the end of his life.
That Church combined his educational mission with a gift for showmanship led some to compare him to P. T. Barnum. The circus promoter who gave us bearded infants, giantesses from Maine, and Jumbo the elephant had earlier established the American Museum, in lower Manhattan. Along with exhibits of skeletons, mummies, and Revolutionary War mementos, the museum included an entire floor of dioramas and panoramic paintings. In phalanxes of varying typeface which mirrored the very babble of democracy, the posters advertising the museum promised “hours and hours of entertainment, instruction, and moral uplift.”
Barnum’s museum wasn’t far south of the Tenth Street Studio, where, over three weeks in May, 1859, Church first displayed “The Heart of the Andes” to twelve thousand ticket-holding patrons. The painting’s gigantic walnut frame resembled a window set into a niche. Heavy draperies on a curtain rod were drawn back to reveal the work, which viewers often had to line up for hours to see. “The subject is new, the scenes are strange, the facts are amazing,” Winthrop wrote, sounding (as Bedell notes) very much like one of Barnum’s publicity leaflets. But Church was not a snob. If he had a bit of show biz in him, it was just one more thing that made him emblematically American.
Among the crowds who came to see the painting was Isabel Carnes, the pretty daughter of a luxury-imports merchant from Dayton, Ohio. By the beginning of 1860, she and Church were engaged. After marrying, they settled on his property in the Hudson Valley.
By then, Church had a band of followers. More than any artist before him, he had made the case for American art—and, by extension, American identity—as distinct, vigorous, and independent. Yet, with the United States on the cusp of civil war, the question of what counted as “American art” became newly charged. Art historians—among them Angela Miller and Tyler Green—have argued that “The Heart of the Andes” was perhaps less about South America than it was about the United States. At a time of intensifying divisions at home, a depiction of Ecuador could offer an Edenic, new-world landscape free from the partisanship tainting Church’s New England landscapes. The Andes’ natural features could symbolically integrate both the North (snowcapped peaks) and the South (hot lowlands). Church was using a foreign landscape, in other words, to appeal for American unity.
When war broke out, Church’s friend Winthrop died on the battlefield; he is often cited as the first Union officer to die in combat. Church’s landscapes from those traumatic years functioned as commentaries on the conflict’s course. Warnings, laments, and odes to renewal were expressed pictorially as dying days under bleeding heavens, belching volcanoes, proud icebergs, lavish rainbows amid spangling, mist-suffusing sunlight and dawns of peace and hope.
Church was the first great American painter to make a point of snubbing Europe; he neither grew up nor trained there, and did not set foot in the Continent until his reputation was long established. Yet he continued to depend heavily on European pictorial conventions, above all that of the Romantic sublime. The sublime—a concept introduced by the first-century philosopher Longinus and later refined by Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant—rests on an encounter with something too immense or too powerful for the human mind to comprehend fully. With it comes an expectation that, as the mind cracks apart under the strain of trying, we might glimpse the transcendent. In landscape painting, the sublime had its origins in the high-angled, panoramic vistas (or “world landscapes”) of Joachim Patinir, Albrecht Altdorfer, and Pieter Bruegel the Elder. It was developed into a rhetoric by Salvator Rosa in the seventeenth century and by Caspar David Friedrich and Turner in the early nineteenth century.
In Church’s hands, the sublime served as an index to the vastness and complexity of nature, the greatness of God, and the “naturalness” of the new nation. But there was something belated about his adoption of this fundamentally European tradition. Compare Church’s landscapes with paintings by the French realists and Impressionists who were his contemporaries, and you become conscious of an assumed relationship between landscape, national identity, and religious revelation that had already begun to feel strained. The landscapes of Church and his peer Albert Bierstadt (who painted the American West) can feel like histrionic versions of Friedrich’s simpler, more concentrated aesthetic.
When Church did finally visit Europe, in the late eighteen-sixties, he was unimpressed. (“The Tiber is not the Hudson,” he wrote.) He was drawn instead to the Levant, and his travels to the Middle East, in 1868, inspired what many consider his last masterpiece—not a painting but Olana, a lovingly designed landscape and his home on a hill in the Hudson Valley. With its winding paths, extensive planting, and choreographed vistas offering views of four states, Olana is a sort of Gesamtkunstwerk to which Church devoted the final decades of his career. “I can make more and better landscapes in this way,” he wrote, “than by tampering with canvas and paint in the studio.”
The eccentric design of Olana was inspired by fortresses in Persia (where, curiously, Church hadn’t travelled), as well as Italian, East Indian, Gothic Revival, and French Second Empire architecture. Its Wunderkammer-like interior, preserved and open to the public since 1967, is hectically eclectic—filled with paintings and sketches by Church and his friends alongside Indian and Chinese furniture, Central Asian textiles, Persian tiles, Mexican sombreros, Japanese paintings, European Old Master copies, and an extensive library.
Church’s fondness for pumping moral rhetoric into his pictures may reassure us that, on questions about slavery, democracy, and the environment, he was on the right side of history (to invoke another innocent illusion). But it’s also what caused his work to fall from favor. His problem was not so much that people stopped buying the rhetoric—it was that people wanted less rhetoric. Winslow Homer, a decade younger than Church, started his career by making illustrations for Harper’s Weekly during the Civil War. He populated his landscapes—closely cropped and near at hand—with real people, not ciphers, and his robust, adhesive style was more in step with vernacular traditions. If, today, Homer feels more emblematically American to us than Church does, it’s because his paintings made his audience care a little more about the story and a little less about its cosmic implications.
In America, the lessons of Impressionism—which coincided in France with the end of an empire and the beginning of the enduring Third Republic—fell on receptive ground. The new movement, as it gathered momentum, unravelled France’s academy-based, state-sponsored Salon system. (The annual juried spring exhibitions at New York’s National Academy of Design were patterned after the Salon.) A thriving republic, artists started to realize, might require fewer visions of the sublime and more images of everyday scenes. People wanted beauty, yes. But, instead of God-bothering sunsets and foreign vistas, they yearned to recognize themselves and the people they loved.
Like the republican project itself, the artistic movements of both Europe and America were a mashup of mutual influences. And yet Europe’s sheer cultural weight intensified America’s thirst for separation. In Church’s day, that separation depended on promoting a robust idea of American innocence over Europe’s enfeebling corruption.
The rhetoric of innocence, even if it’s illusory, can be energizing, but, when it fails to match reality, it can also become exhausting. The distance between the ideal in your head and the facts on the ground can open out at your feet like a canyon. The only way to subdue the dizziness may be to let go of the big ideas—nation, nature, arcs of history bending toward justice, and so on. That may be why the dominant strains in American modernism (at least until the mid-twentieth century, when the sublime reappeared in the work of the Abstract Expressionists) cleaved to the factual, the intimate, the proximate. The poet William Carlos Williams’s rallying cry “No ideas but in things” found echoes all through American culture, including in the writings of Ernest Hemingway, the photography of Walker Evans (“If the thing is there, why there it is”), and the poetry of Frank O’Hara (“I do this, I do that”).
But, even if Church’s propensity to recruit nature for heavy-handed symbolism can seem too much today, something about his work—some combination of thrilling ambition, tact tethered to empiricism, and loving tenderness—continues to magnetize our spectacle-jaded eyes. Sadly, his life rhymed not only with American success but also with American grief. His and Isabel’s first two children both died of diphtheria in March, 1865, just weeks before President Lincoln’s death. Church threw himself into public life, serving as a parks commissioner in New York and helping to found the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His decades-long development of Olana, however, coincided with worsening rheumatoid arthritis. Beginning in his wrist, it eventually affected his entire body. Warm weather helped, so he spent more than a dozen winters in Mexico while Isabel, suffering from her own chronic health troubles, turned increasingly to religion. Fred, their oldest surviving child, was suspended from Princeton for cheating, then caught embezzling from his Seattle employer to feed, Church suspected, a gambling habit. He ended up managing a hotel in Honolulu, far from his dismayed parents.
Shortly before Lincoln’s assassination, in 1865, with the North’s victory in the Civil War in sight, the President had told his wife, Mary, that he wanted to visit Jerusalem and the Holy Land. Around three years later, Church and his family set forth to do what was denied to the Lincolns. Their travels in the Middle East nearly coincided with Mark Twain’s. Church went to the Holy Land in search of sublimity; Twain fastened on the absurdities of those determined to find it. In the book that resulted, “The Innocents Abroad,” Twain’s mockery often settled on his stand-in for the pious guidebook author William C. Prime, who, he wrote, “went through this peaceful land with one hand forever on his revolver, and the other on his pocket-handkerchief. Always, when he was not on the point of crying over a holy place, he was on the brink of killing an Arab.” Twain was by turns amused and appalled by the histrionics that taint our tellings of history, and by the yawning gaps between myth and reality.
Still, when Twain visited Church at Olana, in 1887, he had a wonderful time. It was, he wrote in a thank-you note, “an ideal holiday, in a Garden of Eden.” ♦