Frederic Church did more than any other artist besides Winslow Homer to elevate the reputation of American landscape painting in the 19th century. But although he painted vistas around the United States, from Maine to California, he also captured and romanticised scenes of natural beauty around the world, including South America, Europe, the Middle East and the Arctic circle. In the 1860s he bought a farm and developed it into a 250-acre estate high in the Hudson Valley that looked out on to swathes of not just New York but also Vermont, Massachusetts and Connecticut. This grand homestead has since become a museum and, to mark the bicentenary of Church’s birth, it is putting on an exhibition that does justice to the geographical sweep of the painter’s work (17 May–25 October). These aren’t just pretty pictures: the paintings, drawings and oil sketches on display tell us much about how Church thought of industrialisation, environmental degradation and his country as a whole.
Find out more from the Olana State Historic Site’s website.
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