Church, Frederic Edwin - Cotopaxi (1855)

Frederic Edward Church did not hike into the Andes just to paint a pretty picture. He went chasing a ghost. It was 1853 and the American painter was completely obsessed with the writing of naturalist Alexander von Humboldt. Humboldt told the world that South America was a sublime wonderland of danger and beauty. Church packed his bags and went straight to Ecuador to see the smoke for himself. He found the active volcano Cotopaxi erupting and sketched like a man out of time.

But the final painting from 1855 is a gorgeous lie. Church took his raw field notes back to his New York studio and polished the grit right out of them. He heavily idealized the smoking peak and bathed the entire canvas in a glowing atmospheric light. We call it the American Luminist style today. Back then they just called it magic. Church exhibited this large oil on canvas at the National Academy of Design and the public lost their collective minds. They lined up and paid admission just to stare at an exotic landscape they would never see in real life. The volcano was real but the perfection was pure theater. It gave an anxious country exactly what it wanted. Audiences happily bought the illusion of untouched grandeur and ignored the rumbling under their own feet.

References

Kelly, Franklin. Frederic Edwin Church. Washington National Gallery of Art, 1989.

Novak, Barbara. Nature and Culture American Landscape and Painting 1825 to 1875. New York Oxford University Press, 1995.

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