The Crushing Weight of the Maine Coast

Frederic Edward Church did not paint Beacon off Mount Desert Island just to show off some crashing waves. He painted it because he went to the rugged coast of Maine in 1850 and realized just how small humanity actually is. New York was loud and crowded and full of itself. Out there on the edge of the continent the world was still raw and indifferent to human ambition.

Church took that feeling back to his studio and stretched it across a thirty-one by forty-six inch canvas. He dropped a solitary lighthouse into the frame. It stands as a fragile joke of human order against the crushing power of nature. The ocean does not care about lighthouses and the rocks do not care about the ships they break.

But Church was not a nihilist. He gave us a glowing sky. That intense light bleeding through the clouds was his way of putting God directly into the American wilderness. It was the kind of dramatic lighting that made the stuffy critics at the National Academy of Design stop and stare. The painting secured his reputation as an undisputed master of the sublime landscape.

He was proving that oil paint could capture the terrifying beauty of being alive on a hostile rock spinning through space. We build our little beacons and we hope the light holds out against the dark. Church captured that desperate and beautiful hope perfectly.

References

Church, Frederic Edward. Beacon off Mount Desert Island. 1850. Oil on canvas. 78.7 x 116.8 cm. National Academy of Design Exhibition Records.