The Storm and the Flex
Frederic Edward Church did not paint Rainy Season in the Tropics just to show off some wet foliage. He painted it in 1866 because his country was bleeding out from the Civil War and he needed to prove he was still the undisputed king of American landscape art. The canvas is massive. It spans nearly seven feet wide and it demands your attention. When he unveiled this oil on canvas beast at the Century Association in New York the air was thick with the grief of a fractured nation. People were tired and broken. Church gave them a hallucination of hope.
He did not paint a real place. He took his old sketches from Jamaica and smashed them together with rugged mountains from Colombia to build an impossible composite world. The botanical details are sharp enough to cut yourself on but they are just an anchor. They exist to ground the sheer theatrical insanity of the lighting. A massive double rainbow cuts across the mist and dominates the scene. It was a heavy symbol of national healing served up right when the shooting had stopped but the wounds were still fresh.
This was a fiercely calculated flex. Church wanted everyone to look at this glowing tropical storm and remember who owned the American sublime. The art world was changing but he was not ready to step aside. He packed a wild and wet utopia into a single frame to remind a traumatized public that raw beauty still existed somewhere out there in the rain.
References
Church, Frederic Edward. Rainy Season in the Tropics. 1866. Oil on canvas 142.9 x 214 cm. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
Kelly, Franklin. Frederic Edwin Church. Washington: National Gallery of Art 1989.
Novak, Barbara. Nature and Culture American Landscape and Painting. New York: Oxford University Press 1995.