FREDERIC CHURCH -- THE FINEST EYE

NEW YORK — MAY 1857 — Back when the wilderness was still young and wild, Americans, aside from that treehugger Thoreau, saw Nature as something to be conquered and settled.  Yet one natural wonder was known to all.

By the 1850s, images of Niagara Falls graced most American homes — wallpaper, chinaware, daguerreotypes.   Already a “honeymoon capital,” Niagara Falls drew 60,000 tourists a year.  Even those who had not been there thought they knew the falls.  Then on May 1, 1857, a Manhattan gallery opened a show featuring a single painting.  The room fell silent.  Candles were lit, a curtain drawn.  The audience gasped.

Here was “Niagara.”  Look. (On a big screen, please.). You see the falls.  You feel yourself about to go over.  The water flows through you.  You feel its splash, hear its roar.  

“Niagara,” Harper’s wrote, became "more widely known and admired in this country than any other picture ever painted in America."  But as it toured the East coast, the man who painted the falls headed back into the wild.

CHURCH AND THE HUDSON RIVER SCHOOL

Frederic Church followed an unusual path to art — a straight one.  No bohemian, no  ex-patriate, Church went straight from school to success.  And that school was America’s landscape academy — the Hudson River School.

By the time Church, at 14, began studying with Thomas Cole, the Hudson River School had rejected the icy colonial portraits that filled museums and parlors.  Seeking “a higher style of landscape,” Cole captured a pristine wilderness vanishing before the march of civilization.  

“The painter of American scenery has indeed privileges superior to any other;” Cole wrote.  “All nature here is new to Art. . . . preserved untouched from the time of creation for his heaven-favored pencil.”  Roaming New England and upstate New York, Cole painted Nature  as unsettling and transcendent.  Storms loomed.  Suns set.  Against such majesty, pitiful humanity seemed small and insignificant.

“THE FINEST EYE” ON THE ROAD

Frederic Church studied just four years with Cole, but the teacher saw the student’s natural talent.  Church, Cole said, has “the finest eye for drawing in the world.”  And within two years of Cole’s death in 1848, Church was selling his paintings and pursuing his other passion — travel.

He visited Niagara Falls six times, and when “Niagara” made him famous, Church set out for South America.  There he climbed peaks, paddled rivers, sketched constantly.  Back in his Manhattan studio, he went to work.

Church’s next one-painting show was “Heart of the Andes.”  Here on a wall-sized canvas was a place Americans did not know.  Yet as with “Niagara,” viewers saw the Andes through the finest eye.  Thousands, paying a quarter each, came to the studio to admire the painting, some through opera glasses, others standing for an hour, gaping.  One wrote:  “Let me stand with bare head and expanding chest upon one of Church’s mountain peaks, gazing over a billowy flood of hills.”

But troubles soon beset America’s “national artist.”  Poisoned by the cobalt in his blue paint, the cadmium in his greens, Church also battled rheumatism in his hands.  In 1865, his two children died of diphtheria.  Seeking solace, Church and his wife traveled, and traveled more. 

CHURCH AND OLANA

Then in 1868, after touring the Middle East, they returned to their small home on a bluff overlooking the Hudson.  There the vision was set in stone.

Working with Calvert Vaux, co-designer of Central Park, Church dreamed of a “feudal castle.”  While in Beirut, Jerusalem, and Jordan, Church had filled 15 crates with ceramics, carpets, and other art.  Now he filled his new home with the Middle East he so admired.  In 1872, he moved into Olana.

The view alone is worth the visit.  From the porch you overlook a living painting, as if by Cole or Church.  Storms loom.  Suns set.  You feel small and insignificant.  Then you enter Olana, a world all its own.

STEP INSIDE OLANA

Walls are intricately stenciled.  Windows are amber glass, often overlaid by cut-paper.  Every surface holds exotic trinkets not just from the Middle East but from Church’s later travels through Mexico.  “Visiting Olana,” art critic Robert Hughes wrote, “is like perambulating through Church’s brain.  It is a memory-palace.”

Olana became Church’s landscape in progress.  For thirty years, he tinkered with the house, its gardens, its out buildings.  “I can make more and better landscapes in this way than by tampering with canvas and paint in the studio,” he said.  When he died in 1900, newer and wilder art had left him largely forgotten.  He left Olana to his children.  It stayed in the family until 1966 when the state of New York purchased the site for a historic park.

Far below Olana’s porch, the Hudson River flows on.  Its school is now art history.  America’s wilderness has been conquered, its raw power only flaring up in revenge.  But peer again into “Niagara,” visit the memory palace of Olana, and “a higher style of landscape” seems eternal.

“I enjoy this being afloat on a vast ocean,” Church wrote of his vision, “paddling along in the dreamy belief that I shall reach the desired port in time.”