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• 19th Century American Painting

• South American Landscape , 1856
• oil on canvas
• 14 3/8 in. x 21 1/4 in. (36.51 cm x 53.98 cm)

• Frederic Edwin Church  (Hartford, CT, 5/4/1826 - 4/7/1900, New York, NY)
• American

• Gift of Henry Melville Fuller, 1981.68

• On View

Interpretive text from Exploring American Art: An Online Resource for the American Collections

In 1853, Frederic Church made his first visit to South America, where he found the subject matter that would catapult him to international fame.  The snow-capped mountains, erupting volcanoes, and vast, unsettled plains were the sources of images of a sublime and primeval wilderness that delighted and amazed his fellow New Yorkers.  The details of the landscapes-exotic flowers, trees, and vines, brightly colored birds and strange animals, and picturesque natives-were equally fascinating when rendered in Church's clear, sparkling style.  The best known of these images-The Heart of the Andes (1859; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) and Cotopaxi (1862; Detroit Institute of Arts)-were mammoth in scale and spectacularly dramatic in their imagery.  But in the years just following the 1853 voyage, Church also painted a series of pictures with a domestic scale and lush, pastoral imagery that were equally persuasive of South America as a natural paradise.

The painting South American Landscape was one of a pair of pictures Church executed for the collector John Earl Williams; the companion piece, North America (now lost) was an autumnal scene.  This painting, presumably based on sketches Church made on his five-month trek through Colombia and Ecuador, seems not to represent any particular place, but rather combines elements from various settings to create an image that is placid and picturesque.  The foreground is rich with luxuriantly colored foliage, each leaf of jungle vine and flower painted with eye-catching precision.  The figure on a burro, moving slowly across the bridge toward a thatch-roofed hut, provides local color and directs the viewer's eye toward the infinitely receding plane and the chain of mountains and towering bank of clouds on the horizon.

The Indian and the hut occur in a number of other pictures by Church, where they are generally dwarfed by the tropical vegetation and so indicate the insignificance of human endeavor against the grandeur of nature.  Here, they are surprisingly large and prominent in the composition, and as such carry a different message.  The figure is a witness to the natural splendor spread out before him (and in his gaze at the spectacular vista he mirrors Church's own awe at discovering such scenery); at the same time, enveloped by the same golden light and painted with the same delicate touch, he is a participant in it.  This harmonious coexistence between man and nature is, in the romantic language of Church's day, a token of an Edenic world, bountiful and unspoiled.

CT

REFERENCES

David C. Huntington, Frederic Edwin Church (Washington, D.C.: National Collection of Fine Arts, Smithsonian Institution, 1966), p. 61.