Frederic Church: global artist

Abstract

"The work of Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900), renowned American landscape painter, was indelibly shaped by global travel. Church's art was defined by place: early trips took him to South America, across the northeastern United States, and to the Arctic; later he visited the Caribbean, Europe, and the Middle East; in his final decades, he spent long sojourns in Mexico. Intimate drawings and oil sketches executed on-site illuminate his encounters with new environments and cultures. Large, extravagantly detailed paintings produced for public exhibition made him internationally famous. The designed landscapes, extensive collections, and striking architecture of his home, Olana, in the Hudson Valley, reflect the many worlds through which he traveled. In Frederic Church: Global Artist, original essays by scholars from across the humanities reveal Church as an artist enmeshed in the economic and territorial expansionism of the nineteenth century. Church's works engage with questions of industrialization and environmental destruction, the rise and fall of empires, the construction of national identity, and the cataclysmic effects of slavery and civil war. This lavishly illustrated volume examines the artist in his time and demonstrates his continuing relevance in our own." -- book jacket.

Contents

Foreword / Sean E. Sawyer -- Introduction: global artist / Time Barringer, Elizabeth Kornhauser, and Jennifer Raab -- Empire and indigeneity. Where it begins: landscape and ancestral remembrance / Joseph Mizhakiiyaasige Zordan -- A Jicarilla Apache delegation and the afterlife of Niagara / Manon Gaudet -- Water and land / Christian Ayne Crouch -- The seeds of landscape / Jennifer Raab -- The geography of color / Nicholas Robbins -- Travels in the Americas. Church's icebergs in the age of telegraphy / Siobhan Angus -- Church in the river-world of the Magdalena / Layla Bermeo -- Church's photographic views of the Americas / Monica Bravo -- Religion and landscape: Church in Colombia and Ecuador / Verónica Uribe Hanabergh -- Church's Mexican oil sketches / Shannon Vittoria -- Europe and the Middle East. Church and the problem of Ottoman modernity / Mary Roberts -- An inconvenient truth: Church and the "Holy Land" under Ottoman rule / Diana Seave Greenwald -- Photography as fertilizer: Church in Rome / Maria Antonella Pelizzari -- Slavery and the sublime: Turner, Ruskin, and Twilight in the Wilderness / Tim Barringer -- Rival realisms: Church, Stillman, and the American Pre-Raphaelites / Sophie Lynford -- Surface detail and material self: Church's interior at Olana / Edward S. Cooke, Jr. -- Global collecting: Church and The Metropolitan Museum of Art / Elizabeth Kornhauser.