21 Feb - 19 May 2002

Room Introduction | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8

 Room 7: Explorations 

Throughout the nineteenth century the limits of America were under negotiation: political, scientific and artistic interest was focused on territories to both the north and south of the United States.

Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900) Cotopaxi, 1862 Oil on canvas The Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, Michigan, Founders' Society Purchase, Robert H Tannahill Foundation Fund, Gibbs-Williams Fund, Dexter M Ferry Jr Fund, Merril Fund, Beatrice W Rogers Fund and Richard A Manoogian Fund More about this work...

Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900) The Andes of Ecuador, 1855 Oil on canvas Reynolda House, Museum of American Art, Winston Salem, North Carolina. Original Purchase Fund from Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation, Z Smith Reynolds Foundation, ARCA Foundation, and Anne Cannon Forsyth, 1966 More about this work...

Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900) The Icebergs, 1861 Oil on canvas 64 3/8 x 112 1/2 in. (163.51 x 285.75 cm.) Dallas Museum of Art, anonymous gift More about this work...

The German scientist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt provided authority for the endeavour of describing such regions in his comprehensive work on natural history, Cosmos (1845), which explained these virgin worlds as expressions of the infinite fecundity of God. Under that inspiration Frederic Church twice travelled in South America, in 1853 and 1857. He found there a realisation of the Biblical Paradise which Cole had only been able to imagine.

Ecuador was dominated by its majestic volcanoes, Chimborazo, the 'giant of the west,' Sangay and Cotopaxi, whose peaks seemed natural echoes of the transparent domes rising into the firmament in Cole's or John Martin's visions of Heaven. Shown here is The Andes of Ecuador in which Church sought to present a panorama or summary of South American nature under its burning sun; Cotopaxi erupting shows 'Andean grandeur and energy'. Later, in Rainy Season in the Tropics, also shown in this room, he created out of the national sense of relief at the conclusion of the Civil War a new image of God's Covenant with Noah: the rainbow uniting man and nature in an ecstatic bond of peace and deliverance.

Humboldt had also described the Arctic, where nature took very different forms, beautiful to the eye of the naturalist seeking God's perfection in earthly wonders. Church's Icebergs, shown here, was the result of a trip to Newfoundland and Labrador in 1859. It is one of the supreme monuments of Ruskinian naturalism, a summation of many fine studies made on the spot and a compendium of the natural history of ice. Church followed a long tradition among painters of historical subjects in presenting his large canvases as spectacles, in specially lit and decorated rooms.