{"id":11547,"date":"2025-09-16T18:26:58","date_gmt":"2025-09-16T22:26:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/frederic-edwin-churchs-immersive-19th-century-paintings-of-natural-wonders-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2025-09-16T18:26:58","modified_gmt":"2025-09-16T22:26:58","slug":"frederic-edwin-churchs-immersive-19th-century-paintings-of-natural-wonders-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/frederic-edwin-churchs-immersive-19th-century-paintings-of-natural-wonders-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"Frederic Edwin Church\u2019s Immersive 19th-century Paintings of Natural Wonders \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
\n<\/p>\n

\n

In the spring of 1859, as On the Origin of Species<\/em> was going to press, New Yorkers flooded the first studio building for artists to see The Heart of the Andes<\/em> \u2014 a single painting exhibited by itself in an unknown young artist\u2019s studio. <\/p>\n

Alexander von Humboldt\u2019s account of his time Latin America<\/a>, which had sent Darwin on his epochal voyage, had sent Frederic Edwin Church<\/strong> (May 4, 1826\u2013April 7, 1900) in Humboldt\u2019s footsteps and returned him enraptured, transformed, restless to render the experience palpable, to transport others who would never have a chance to contact such ravishing wildness \u2014 a place of \u201cperpetual spring,\u201d as Humboldt had written in Cosmos<\/em>, where \u201cthe depths of the earth and the vaults of heaven display all the richness of their forms and the variety of their phenomena,\u201d where the laws of nature \u201cstand indelibly described on the rocky walls and abrupt declivities of the Cordilleras.\u201d <\/p>\n

Quiet and introverted, prone to melancholy, Church had always been drawn to the wild wonders of nature, saved and set free by them. An earlier painting of Niagara Falls had prompted a London paper to declare that \u201cart wasn\u2019t limited to Europe\u201d and that \u201cit was not necessary for genius to study in any school but that of nature.\u201d His cloudscapes surpassed even those of his Norwegian contemporary Knud Baade<\/a>. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Niagara<\/em> by Frederic Edwin Church, 1857. (Available as a print<\/a> and a postcard<\/a>.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"\"<\/a>
Twilight in the Wilderness<\/em> by Frederic Edwin Church, 1860. (Available as a print<\/a> and a postcard<\/a>.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

But The Heart of the Andes<\/em> was something else entirely. <\/p>\n

On the immense canvas, occupying nearly the entire wall of his studio, the thirty-two-year-old artist had painted not what he had seen in the Andes but what he had felt \u2014 the \u201cunparalleled magnificence\u201d of this lush land, he gasped in his diary, proclaiming it \u201cone of the great wonders of Nature.\u201d The setting was a real place just outside Quito, but Church had infused it with elements of other Andean landscapes that had impressed themselves upon his soul during two separate trips four years apart \u2014 a composite of the enchanted imagination he spent more than a year composing. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
The Heart of the Andes<\/em> by Frederic Edwin Church, 1859. (Available as a print<\/a> and a postcard<\/a>.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Peak by peak the mountain cascades toward the clouds until it merges with the sky as its foot melts into a waterfall. Details of exquisite aliveness punctuate the vista \u2014 a blue-blooming shrub, a pendulous bird\u2019s nest, a resplendent quetzal perched on a branch, lichen on the bark of a broken tree, two people kneeling before a white wooden cross \u2014 all of it awash in light that only consciousness can see<\/a>, impossible for a camera lens to capture. <\/p>\n

\"\"
Detail from The Heart of the Andes<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Rebelling against the stale convention of gilded frames, Church had invented a new kind of frame made of walnut wood, onto which he draped curtains to give the illusion of a window opening when the painting was being revealed. Silver reflectors focused gas lights onto the canvas to emulate the sunlit atmosphere of the landscape itself. The effect, The New York Times<\/em> wrote, was \u201csimply magical\u201d \u2014 \u201ca new sensation in art, giving a reality of atmospheric space to the picture, and a delicacy to the tones of the coloring, which must be seen to be at all appreciated or understood.\u201d Before the days of easy travel, before color photography, most of the visitors had never seen and would never see with their own eyes nature so wild, mountains so majestic. Here was virtual reality \u2014 an immersion in light, color, and feeling that speaks not just to the eye but to the entire system of being we call soul. <\/p>\n

\"\"
Detail from The Heart of the Andes<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

For three weeks, people packed into Church\u2019s studio, sometimes more than two thousand per day, gasping each time the curtain was drawn open, shuddering with the vertigo of the sublime. On the closing day, the line for admission curled around the block, around the clock. An influential art collector who would help found the Metropolitan Museum of Art a decade later ended up purchasing the painting for $10,000 \u2014 more than anyone had ever paid for a work by an American artist. <\/p>\n

The Heart of the Andes<\/em> was also an emblem of the cruelties of chance and the mercies of chance. Just after the exhibition opened, Church received devastating news of his hero \u2014 89 and weakened by a stroke, Alexander von Humboldt had greeted death the way he had lived life: \u201cHow glorious these sunbeams are!\u201d were his last words, \u201cThey seem to call Earth to the Heavens!\u201d <\/p>\n

He could have been describing Church\u2019s painting; he could have been describing that incandescent cosmos of connection two people enter when they fall in love \u2014 the cosmos Church what thrust into without warning when he encountered among the thousands of spectators the woman who would become the love of his life. Within a year, he had married Isabel at the picturesque Hudson Valley mansion<\/a> he bought with his earnings from The Heart of the Andes<\/em>. <\/p>\n

\"\"
Frederic and Isabel<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

At forty-four, on the insistence of Central Park creator Frederick Law Olmsted, Church became Park Commissioner of New York \u2014 the closest thing to a guardian angel of the urban wilderness. He would devote the rest of his life capturing nature\u2019s wildness and wonder in transportive paintings of rainbows and volcanos, waterfalls and icebergs, numberless cloud studies and sunsets, moonrise and the aurora borealis, all of them rendered with that rare combination of passion and precision that makes anything \u2014 a painting, a poem, a person \u2014 great. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Cotopaxi<\/em> by Frederic Edwin Church, 1862. (Available as a print<\/a> and a postcard<\/a>.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"\"<\/a>
Iceberg and Ice Flower<\/em> by Frederic Edwin Church, 1859. (Available as a print<\/a> and a postcard<\/a>.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"\"<\/a>
El Rio de Luz (The River of Light)<\/em> by Frederic Edwin Church, 1877. (Available as a print<\/a> and a postcard<\/a>.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"\"<\/a>
Cotopaxi<\/em> by Frederic Edwin Church, 1867. (Available as a print<\/a> and a postcard<\/a>.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"\"<\/a>
Moonlight at Church\u2019s Farm<\/em> by Frederic Edwin Church, 1860s. (Available as a print<\/a> and a postcard<\/a>.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"\"<\/a>
Nightfall Near Olana<\/em> by Frederic Edwin Church, 1872. (Available as a print<\/a> and a postcard<\/a>.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

And much of it he shared with Isabel, who sat with him sunset after sunset over the Hudson Valley, pressed ferns into an herbarium alongside him while he painted in Jamaica \u2014 a living reminder that there is no greater form of love than looking together in the direction of wonder. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Aurora Borealis<\/em> by Frederic Edwin Church, 1865. (Available as a print<\/a> and a postcard<\/a>.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"\"<\/a>
Rainy Season in the Tropics<\/em> by Frederic Edwin Church. (Available as a print<\/a> and a postcard<\/a>.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Profit<\/a>
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the spring of 1859, as On the Origin of Species was going to press, New Yorkers flooded the first studio building for artists to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11548,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11547","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-purpose"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11547","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11547"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11547\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11548"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11547"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11547"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11547"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}