Mark Twain was not a man given to gush, especially over representations of effete, high-brow culture, but upon seeing Frederic Church’s monumental landscape “The Heart of the Andes” for the first time in 1861, the then-21-year-old Mississippi River steamboat pilot was beside himself over “the most wonderfully beautiful painting this city (St. Louis) has ever seen.”
That gigantic (nearly 6 feet by 10 feet) work became the most famous American painting of its time and was hailed as the ultimate triumph of the Hudson River landscape school, which dominated American art for much of the 19th Century.
It has been re-enshrined this fall in a special exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, along with a number of Church’s preparatory studies and related paintings of the same genre by some of the artist’s contemporaries.
In a separate but complementary exhibition, the Metropolitan also is showing “Master Drawings of the Hudson River School,” including works by Thomas Cole (1801-1848), founder of the landscape genre. At the same time, the nearby National Academy of Design is exhibiting some 100 rare oils, drawings and watercolors by the short-lived Thomas Hotchkiss (1833-1869), considered the “poet” of American landscape painters.
The Hudson River school-America’s first indigenous school of landscape painting-fed upon the United States’ and the Old World’s fascination with the North American wilderness. The artists’ technique was highly realistic and painstaking in attention to detail, but these painters exaggerated the natural grandeur of their subjects with a sense of awe, reverence and even religious fervor. Whether sketching and painting peaceful woodland glens or vast, breathtaking tableaux dominated by towering peaks and immense vistas, they implied visions of paradise. Indeed, they were shrines to nature, as in Cole’s idyllic 1840 oil “The Voyage of Life.” One hallmark of the Hudson River school is the diminutive, insignificant size of the mere humans the artists allowed in their pictures-giving enormous scale to the landscapes.
Beginning in New York City in 1825, these artists moved north into the Hudson River Valley and east into the rural wildness of New England. In time, they were wandering all over the hemisphere, from the Arctic North to the jungles of South America, seeking ever more majestic and exotic settings. They encouraged and spiritualized America’s mid-century obsession with Manifest Destiny.
Church (1826-1900), a student of Cole’s, rose through his mastery of this genre to become the most famous and probably richest American painter of his era. He was an indefatigable worker and traveler, trekking over rugged and forbidding territory on horseback and foot as he prepared for his projects.
Not incidentally, one of his mentors, the German-born naturalist painter Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859), had, in his artistic pursuits, once climbed 19,300 feet up Ecuador’s 20,577-foot Mount Chimborazo, then believed the highest in the world. It was this mountain’s snow-covered peak that Church chose as the background focal point for “Heart of the Andes.”
He had painted Niagara Falls (“Niagara,” 1857) and other natural wonders, but “Heart of the Andes” was his most ambitious work. Church made two trips to South America, intrepidly pursuing his goal via steamboat, canoe, mule and on foot. He spent weeks studying tropical trees and fauna he intended to depict in the foreground, only to decide instead on foliage common to higher altitudes for the final version, which he did not complete until 1859.
His “Andes” tableau leads dauntingly from river rapids upstream to a high waterfall and then follows the watercourse to the edge of a wide plain that sweeps up to foothills and a high, shouldering mountain ridge whose upper reaches are strewn with clouds. Beyond this ridge to the left, dazzling in the sunlight, is Chimborazo. At the center of the picture is a tiny assemblage of Spanish-style buildings almost imperceptible unless the viewer stands near. In the left foreground, on a little bluff overlooking the river, an equally miniscule human traveler pauses by a trailside cross. Every detail of the picture, from mountaintop cleft to foreground bush-appears in brilliant focus.
“I have seen it several times,” wrote Twain, “but it is always a new picture-totally new-you seem to see nothing the second time which you saw the first.”
When it was first exhibited in New York in 1859, for the then sizable admission fee of 25 cents, it drew 25,000 people. Transported to London, it was received with equal enthusiasm-the British Art Journal proclaiming: “Westward the sun of Art seems rolling.” On a subsequent American tour, it drew 4,000 people in five weeks in the then small western city of Chicago-in the dead of winter.
Joining “Heart of the Andes” in the Metropolitan Museum exhibition are several pictures with similar settings, including Louis Remy Mignot’s steamy “Landscape in Ecuador,” also completed in 1859, and the derivative “Morning in the Andes” (1870) by Andrew Melrose.
Church is represented in the Metropolitan’s accompanying Hudson River drawings show with a deft graphite and white gouache “Niagara Falls in Winter,” but the dominant work in this exhibition is the watercolor “Lake Squam from Red Hill” (1874) by William Trost Richards (1833-1905). A small painting noted for the transcending and transforming powers of its light, it shows a shimmering, island-strewn northern lake at sunset in the midst of hills and mountains. Clouds race across the sky, obscuring the sun, which is visible only as a reflection in the water.
Thomas Hotchkiss began painting in the Catskills and New Hampshire in his early 20s. Unlike Church and Bierstadt, Hotchkiss at first avoided the sweeping panorama and bold dramatic wilderness tableaux and concentrated on quiet, contemplative studies that focused more on the near than the distant. A youthful romantic, Hotchkiss was born in 1833 in upstate Coxsackie, N.Y. By age 24, he had exhibited at the National Academy of Design and two years later was elected a member.
Considered a genius by his fellow artists, but little known to the public, he moved to Italy in 1860, living as a mysterious, penniless artistic figure haunted by his own impending doom.
In his work, he turned to ruins, in particular those of the ancient and largely uninhabited undulating plain outside Rome called the “Campagna.” In this desolation, strewn with centuries-old architectual wreckage, he produced somber, contemplative scenes that seemed depictions of Earth after the passing of man. Fresh and green in their naturalness at the outset, these Italian canvases increasingly became imbued with a fiery pink light.
Hotchkiss died in 1869, just 36 years old.
———-
“Dreams and Shadows: Thomas H. Hotchkiss in 19th Century Italy,” curated by Barbara Novak and drawn from the collection of the New York Historical Society, closes Jan. 16. The Metropolitan’s Hudson River drawing show closes Dec. 26 and its “The Heart of the Andes” exhibition concludes Jan. 2.
