Frederic Edwin Church

Goupil & Co., New York, 1875
John and Kate Buckingham, Chicago, Illinois and Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 1875
Henry W. Buckingham and Clifford H. Buckingham (their sons), Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 1907
Gift to the present owner from the above, 1909

New York, Goupil & Co., 1875
Chicago, Illinois, Fourth Annual Inter-State Exposition, September-October 1876, no. 262
Cambridge, Massachusetts, Fogg Art Museum, Luminous Landscape: The American Study of Light 1860-1875, April-May 1966, no. 9, pp. 20-21
Hanover, New Hampshire, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Frederic E. Church: Under Changing Skies, April-June 1993

"The Fine Arts/Notes," The New York Times, April 10, 1875, p. 3
"The Fine Arts/Notes," The New York Times, April 17, 1875, p. 3
"Mr. Church's New Painting," The Evening Post, April 22, 1875, p. 2 
"Mr. Church's New Picture," The New York Times, April 25, 1875, p. 10
"Mr. F.E. Church's New Painting," Hartford Daily Courant, April 27, 1875, p. 2
"Art Matters/'The Valley of the Santa Isabel,'" New York Herald, May 1, 1875, p. 8
"Gossip, Society, Etc...," Bloomfield Saturday Gazette, May 8, 1875, p. 2
"The Arts," Appleton's Journal, May 8, 1875, p. 600
"Art Notes," Christian Union, May 12, 1875, p. 401
Nation, May 20, 1875, p. 352
"Mr. Church's New Painting," Appleton's Journal, June 1875, p. 179 
"Critics and Painters," New York World, June 19, 1875, pp. 4-5
"Art and Drama," Springfield Daily Republican, June 19, 1875, pp. 4-5
"New Publications," The New York Times, June 25, 1875, p. 10
"New Magazines," Bangor Daily Whig and Courier, June 29, 1875, p. 2
"Pictures, Music and the Stage," Springfield Daily Republican, July 3, 1875
Henry James, Jr., "On Some Pictures Lately Exhibited," Galaxy, July 1875, p. 96
Chicago Times, August 20, 1876, p. 2
"In a Good Light," Chicago Times, September 24, 1876, p. 10
"The Exposition," Chicago Daily Tribune, September 6, 1876, p. 3
Henry W. French, Art and Artists in Connecticut, Boston, Massachusetts, 1879, p. 130
John D. Champlin, Jr., Cyclopedia of Painters and Painting, New York, 1885, vol. 1, p. 295
"Church, Frederic Edwin," Appleton's Cyclopedia of American Biography, New York, 1887, vol. 1, p. 613
"Two Paintings for Museum: Zenas Crane and Buckingham Bros. Give Pictures," The Pittsfield Journal, May 11, 1909
"Berkshire, the Ideal Small City Museum, Reopens in Modern Dress," The Art Digest, vol. XI, no. 18, July 1937, p. 5, illustrated p. 7
Henry James, The Painter's Eye, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1956, p. 101
David C. Huntington, Frederic Edwin Church, 1826-1900: Painter of the Adamic New World Myth, Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, 1960, pp. 205-07
David C. Huntington, "Landscapes and Diaries: The South American Trips of F.E. Church," Brooklyn Museum Annual, vol. V, 1963-64, pp. 65-98, illustrated p. 95
John W. McCourbrey, ed., American Art 1700-1960: Sources and Documents, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1965
David C. Huntington, The Landscapes of Frederic Edwin Church, New York, 1966, p. 104
David C. Huntington and Richard P. Wunder, Frederic Edwin Church, Washington, D.C., 1966, p. 37
S. Lane Faison, Jr., The Art Museums of New England, Boston, Massachusetts, 1982, no. 195, p. 267, illustrated
"American Paintings in the Collection of the Berkshire Museum, Pittsfield, Massachusetts," The Magazine Antiques, November 1982, p. 1056, illustrated
James L. Yarnall and William H. Gerdts, The National Museum of American Art's Index to American Art Exhibition Catalogues: From the Beginning Through the 1876 Centennial Year, vol. 1, Boston, Massachusetts, 1986, no. 17338, p. 719
Franklin Kelly, Frederic Edwin Church, Washington, D.C., 1989, pp. 64, 65, 67, 169, illustrated fig. 37, p. 64
Gerald L. Carr, Frederic Edwin Church: Catalogue Raisonné of Works of Art at Olana State Historic Site, New York, 1994, vol. 1, pp. 370, 511
Gerald L. Carr, In Search of the Promised Land: Paintings by Frederic Edwin Church, New York, 2000, illustrated pl. 65, p. 181

In 1879, a critic for Harper’s New Monthly Magazine “in assessing the previous fifty years of American art…noted that it was in the work of [Frederic] Church that the national school of landscape found, its culminating excellence…What [Byron’s] ‘Childe Harold’ did for the scenery of the Old World, the art of Church has done for that of the New.  The vastness of this continent were yet unrevealed to us.  With the enthusiasm of a Raleigh or a Balboa he has explored land and sea, combining the elements of explorer and artist…Our civilization needed exactly this form of art expression at this period, and the artist appeared who taught the people to love beauty and to find it” (Frederic Edwin Church, Washington, D.C. 1989, p. 16).  Painted several years earlier, in 1875, Valley of Santa Isabel, New Granada is a superb example of Church’s South American scenes that magnificently manifests this statement.

Church’s distant travels largely defined his career and beginning in 1850, his wanderlust took him to places as widespread as the Arctic, the Middle East, Jamaica, South America, and to domestic locals such as Mount Desert, Maine, the Natural Bridge in Virginia, Mammouth Cave in Kentucky and Niagara Falls.  Of all the places to which he traveled, it is his depictions of South America with which he is most associated and his dramatic and romantic renderings such as Valley of Santa Isabel, New Granada fundamentally influenced the popular conception of the southern continent in the American and European imaginations, defining their vision of this distant region.

The catalyst for Church’s initial fascination with South America was Alexander von Humboldt’s Cosmos of 1845, which encouraged artists to travel to the continent and depict its tropical landscape (Fig. 1).  This treatise ignited the artist’s imagination and inspired him to visit the continent twice, in 1853 and again in 1857.  On these visits he trekked through Panama, Ecuador, Peru and Colombia making notes and sketches that would serve as source material for a number of major studio paintings.  Church’s captivation with South America demonstrated the Victorian near obsession with the exotic and was shared by fellow artists Martin Johnson Heade and Louis Remy Mignot, who accompanied his 1857 trip.  This deep interest in remote locales also reflected the greater movement of American artists responding to increasing industrialization by seeking to depict pristine landscapes unaltered by the hand of man.  These idealized scenes celebrated the divine in nature and were meant to commemorate an earlier, more innocent time.  Church and others traveled to South America in search of primeval terrain in the face of increasing development in the Northeast much as Thomas Cole and Sanford Robinson Gifford had trekked to Kaaterskill Falls and Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran ventured West in search of a new Eden. 

When he wrote Cosmos, “Humboldt knew that several important artists had visited the tropics, [but] he felt that none had truly succeeded in conveying the full effect of the magnificent scenery…Church would take up this challenge with such vigor and determination that he would, in a few years, become known as ‘the very painter Humboldt so longs for in his writings’” (Franklin Kelly, et al., Frederic Edwin Church, Washington, D.C., 1989, p. 48). Church’s South American paintings were an immediate success commencing with their appearance at the National Academy of Design in 1855 and his subsequent unveiling of the grand-scale Heart of the Andes (Fig. 2, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) in 1859, which met with great praise and huge attendance when exhibited on both sides of the Atlantic. 

By the time Church painted Valley of Santa Isabel, New Granada in 1875, South America was being rapidly developed, experiencing the encroachment of railroads and others signs of modern industrialization.  The present work relates to a series of tropical scenes Church painted in the late 1860s to mid-1870s including Sunset in the Tropics, 1868 (Fruitlands Museums, Harvard, Massachusetts), Tropical Scenery of 1873 (Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, New York) and El Rio de Luz (The River of Light), 1877 (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.).  Gerald Carr writes that “Church clothed…his…tropical pictures of the 1870s in veils of nostalgia not only for personal reasons, among them that he had aged a generation since the 1850s, and for artistic ones, among them his lately developed respect for Old Masters and pressure from an American contemporary, Norton Bush (1834-1894).  Church’s perspective had changed because equatorial America itself was changing” (In Search of the Promised Land: Paintings by Frederic Edwin Church, New York, 2000, pp. 71-72). 

Valley of Santa Isabel, New Granada is a superb example of Church’s tropical works from the period that makes no reference to the changing landscape of the region.  Rather, he depicts an Edenic landscape suffused in warm light and imbued with tranquility – a scene of the tropical bucolic.  He masterfully renders the atmosphere so as to convey the heat and humidity of the thick, tropical air radiating off the lush greenery.  The scene is reverent to the power and scale of the landscape, which is underscored by the figures in the foreground that are dwarfed by the immensity of the landscape.  This effect is further heightened by the cropping of the painting, the trees extending beyond the confines of the canvas.

Valley of Santa Isabel, New Granada retains its original, Church designed frame allowing today’s viewer to experience the painting as the artist originally intended.  The Moorish inspired frame demonstrates the influence of Church’s trip to the Middle East in the 1860s, which also provided significant source material for the construction of his estate on the Hudson River, Olana.  The juxtaposition of these diverse influences further underscores the Victorian fascination with the distant and exotic as well as Church’s ability to synthesize various inspirations into his own inimitable style. “In short, Church managed to create works of both profound intellectual interest and compelling artistic beauty” (Frederic Edwin Church, Washington, D.C., 1989, p. 16).

 Dr. Franklin Kelly writes of the continuing appeal and power of Church’s works such as Valley of Santa Isabel, New Granada, “his paintings are still undeniably capable of evoking thoughtful wonder about the mysteries of art and the complexities of the natural world and of providing delight and fascination” (Frederic Edwin Church, Washington, D.C., 1989, p. 16).