Frederic Edwin Church
Frederic Edwin Church (1826 – 1900) was an American landscape painter. He was a pupil of Thomas Cole and heavily influenced by J M W Turner (known in this encyclopedia as William Turner). He painted the mountains of New England, the tropics, the rivers, waterfalls, and volcanoes of the Andes (Chimborazo, Cotopaxi, and Sangay), the sunlit landscapes of America, the icebergs of the far North, the coast of Maine, Europe and the Middle East. Church, at the end of his active painting career, like many American painters in the last decades of the nineteenth century, sought through light a poetic unity in place of a scientific one based on a painstaking detailing of the physical world. [1] He laid the foundation for the post-Civil War generation of landscape painters, among them Albert Bierstadt and George Inness. [2]
He was a central figure in the Hudson River School of American landscape painters. While committed to the natural sciences, he was "always concerned with including a spiritual dimension in his works". [3]
Niagara Falls from the American Side, 1867.
Broken Columns, View from the Parthenon, Athens, 1869.
Landscape in the Adirondacks.