In addition to painting the splendor of North American scenery, Frederic Edwin Church traveled through South America in the 1850s and created dramatic Andean landscapes that were inspired by the German scientist Alexander von Humboldt’s 1849 travel accounts. Humboldt urged artists to paint South America in order to study and represent the earth in its most original state. The soft outlines and suffused golden light of this placid Ecuadorian landscape, however, lend it a nostalgic air. Altered perhaps by the veil of memory or the mellowing that comes with age, Church’s later renderings of the area relinquished the scientific purposefulness of his earlier paintings in favor of more generalized views and quieter moods.
ARTIST Frederic Edwin Church, American, 1826–1900
MEDIUM Oil on canvasPlace Made: United States
DATES 1873
DIMENSIONS Frame: 56 1/2 × 77 3/4 × 5 3/8 in., 128 lb. (143.5 × 197.5 × 13.7 cm, 58.06kg) image: 38 3/4 × 60 in. (98.4 × 152.4 cm) (show scale)
SIGNATURE Signed lower center: “F.E. Church / -73”
COLLECTIONS American Art
ACCESSION NUMBER 63.150
CREDIT LINE Dick S. Ramsay Fund
EXHIBITIONS
MUSEUM LOCATION This item is not on view
CAPTION Frederic Edwin Church (American, 1826–1900). Tropical Scenery, 1873. Oil on canvas, Frame: 56 1/2 × 77 3/4 × 5 3/8 in., 128 lb. (143.5 × 197.5 × 13.7 cm, 58.06kg). Brooklyn Museum, Dick S. Ramsay Fund, 63.150 (Photo: Brooklyn Museum, 63.150_SL1.jpg)
IMAGE overall, 63.150_SL1.jpg. Brooklyn Museum photograph
RIGHTS STATEMENT No known copyright restrictions
RECORD COMPLETENESS
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Coast of Grand Manan Island, Canada, Frederic Edwin Church, August or September 1851, Smithsonian: Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.
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