The Left-Handed Ghost Story of Mount Katahdin
Frederic Edwin Church did not paint Mount Katahdin from Millinocket Camp to sell tickets to a crowd. He painted it because his world was shrinking and his body was failing him. It was 1891. The man who once charged admission for theatrical unveilings of towering South American volcanoes was now quietly staring at the Maine wilderness.
Severe rheumatoid arthritis had turned his right hand into a useless crippled claw. Most men would have put the brushes down. Church simply switched hands. He taught his clumsy left hand how to mix oil on canvas and dragged it across the fabric to capture a world that was dying right alongside him.
Industrial logging was already gnawing at the edges of the pristine forest. This view of Mount Katahdin was a ghost story before the trees even fell. Church knew what was coming. He painted the untamed brush and the still water as a private monument and gave it to his wife Isabel. There were no velvet curtains or paying crowds for this one.
It is roughly twenty-six by forty-two inches of quiet defiance. Church was fighting a war against his own rotting joints and the relentless march of industry. Every left-handed brushstroke was a refusal to go quietly. He captured the American landscape just as the machine age arrived to devour it.
References
Avery, Kevin J. Churchs Great Picture. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1993.
Howat, John K. American Paradise The World of the Hudson River School. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1987.
Kelly, Franklin. Frederic Edwin Church. Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1989.