Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900) is the most grandiloquent and vivid American landscape painter whose greatest works inspired awe about natural wonders and their splendor and who carried forward the "manifest destiny" of a wilderness that nurtured his teacher, Thomas Cole, the founder of the Hudson River School of painting.
Whereas Cole knew the mountains and valleys of New York State and New England and had visited Europe, Church would explore afar and travel from the Artic to the erupting volcanoes of Central America and to the ruins of the Classical World in the Middle East. His exotic home, Olana, in Hudson, New York, was designed by architect Calvert Vaux, who helped Frederick Law Olmstead create Central Park in Manhattan, in a style that showed Moorish influences and whose contents include the memorabilia of Church’s vast travels.
Church’s early works clearly show the influence of Cole in their bucolic and pastoral scenes that epitomized the Hudson River School of landscape painting. As his first and most prominent student, Church was greatly influenced by Cole and paid homage to him in more than one painting. A few of Church’s early landscapes follow closely in the typical Hudson River School style established by Cole: horizontal pastoral scenes that accurately depict real sites at their best, which is to say, in marvelous light and only rarely encumbered with human intrusion: pure, gentle wilderness of memorable and tranquil beauty.
"The Natural Bridge"~Frederic Edwin Church
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