A Defiant Eden
Frederic Edward Church did not paint the jungle because he was standing in it. He painted it because his body was betraying him and he needed to remember what raw strength felt like. It was 1877 and severe rheumatoid arthritis was systematically destroying his right hand. Every single brushstroke was a brutal negotiation with pain. He was standing before a massive canvas spanning over seven feet wide. Decades had passed since his actual South American expeditions. He was relying entirely on fading memory and old sketches to build an impossible Eden.
Church took a river from one region and a canopy from another. He stitched completely incompatible ecosystems together into one idealized master landscape. It was a beautiful lie born of pure physical desperation. The oil paint is laid down with an urgency that masks his failing grip.
He dragged Morning in the Tropics to the Century Association in New York expecting the usual breathless awe. But the art world had moved on. Critics were exhausted by these massive theatrical landscapes. They wanted intimate and moody instead of bombastic and grand. Church was offering them a monumental dream of the tropics while the taste makers were already turning their backs on him.
Yet the painting survives as an incredible act of defiance. Church was watching his own era end and feeling his own physical ruin set in. He answered both tragedies by painting the brightest and greenest morning he could possibly conjure.
References
Howat, John K. Frederic Church. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005.
Kelly, Franklin. Frederic Edwin Church. Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1989.
Raab, Jennifer. Frederic Church The Art and Science of Detail. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015.