CHURCH, Frederic Edwin (Hartford, 1826 – New York, 1900)
Frederic Edwin Church, the son of a very successful businessman was born in Hartford, Connecticut, on 4 May 1826. In the early 1840s, he studied with Alexander Emmons and Benjamin Coe and was friends with the painter, Ralph Isham and the sculptor, Edward Bartholomew. Through the influence of Daniel Wadsworth, an important Hartford patron of the arts, Church studied from 1844 to 1846 with the leading Hudson River School landscape painter, Thomas Cole, in Catskill (NY). From 1847 to 1858 Church resided in New York City at the Art Union Building. In 1848 he was elected an associate of the National Academy of Design; the next year he became an academician. He accepted William J. Stillman, who later became one of the editors of The Crayon, an influential American art periodical, as his first pupil; in 1850 Jervis McEntee became his second.
Church travelled with Cyrus W. Field as far west as the upper Mississippi River in 1851. The same year he also went to Grand Manan lsland and the Bay of Fundy, Canada and to Mount Katahdin and Mount Desert in Maine. Inspired by the publication of Alexander von Humboldt’s Cosmos in the late 1840s, Church and Field journeyed to Colombia and Ecuador, South America in 1853. In 1856 Church travelled to Niagara Falls on three separate occasions; Niagara (1857, Washington, DC, The Corcoran Gallery of Art), which was exhibited in New York and London, established the artist’s reputation. He again journeyed to Mount Katahdin, this time with Theodore Winthrop whose account of their journey, Life in the Open Air, was published in 1863. Church made his second trip to South America in 1857 travelling with Louis Mignot to Ecuador. From 1858–87, he maintained quarters at the Tenth Street Studio Building. In 1859 the artist travelled along the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador with the Reverend Louis Legrand Noble, who described the trip in his book, After Icebergs with a Painter, published in 1861. William T. Blodgett purchased Church’s Heart of the Andes (1859, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art) for $10,000 establishing a record price for a living American artist.
In 1860 Church married and purchased a farm at Hudson, New York. Some of his greatest landscapes were painted during this period: Twilight in the American Wilderness (1860, The Cleveland Museum of Art); The Icebergs (1861, Dallas Museum of Art); and Cotopaxi (1862, The Detroit Institute of Arts). Shortly after the death of his son and daughter from diphtheria in 1865, Church travelled to Jamaica with Horace W. Robbins, who had been the teacher of H. Bolton Jones. From 1867–69, Church travelled extensively throughout Europe and the Near East.
In 1870 Church, working with the architect Calvert Vaux, began construction of his exotic Persian-style home, Olana, which was built on the eighteen acres of property he had acquired in 1867 on the summit above his previous farm. He moved into his not yet completed home in late 1872; a studio wing was added in 1888–89. By the 1870s Church was suffering from inflammatory rheumatism which greatly curtailed his painting activity. From 1883 until his death, he spent most of his winters in Mexico. Church died in New York City on 7 April 1900; a memorial exhibition of his work was held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art the same year.
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