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The Heart of the Andes
(painting, 1859)
There was a time when a major new painting could attract the kind of interest and publicity that a new film does today, drawing large and enthusiastic crowds to pay to see a single work of art. One such painting was Frederic Church’s The Heart of the Andes, which he had created following an extensive trip to South America, where he trekked through jungles and up mountain peaks in search of exotic beauty. Traveling where few North Americans had ever gone, he experienced a journey through Colombia and Ecuador that was filled with much hardship and several brushes with danger, but it produced one of his most awe-inspiring canvases.
The Heart of the Andes is not a literal representation of any one particular viewpoint that one might see hiking the heights of these legendary mountains but rather an idealized view composed from various sketches he made during his journey—the natural world rearranged for maximum dramatic effect. It is a huge painting, without any one central focus, which must be taken in slowly and leisurely, letting the eye wander over the gorgeous expanse that includes a snowcapped mountain range in the far distance, verdant mountains in the middle ground, and a waterfall with lush tropical vegetation in the foreground. Light rakes across the painting, illuminating the plunging waterfall and its surrounding trees and throwing a spotlight upon a solitary cross in the middle left of the canvas. The cross, for Church, is perhaps the true heart of the Andes, a reminder of the God who created these mountains. In his painting Church sought not only to capture the beauty he had seen but also to impart the same sort of spiritual elevation he had felt when his eyes originally scanned the unfolding splendor. The resulting picture is a grand and sublime vista, infused with Church’s vision of the mystery and majesty of creation.
Church was not only a great painter but also an entrepreneur and showman who figured out how to exhibit this painting to greatest effect by installing it in a gallery along a busy street in New York City. The canvas was over five feet high and almost ten feet wide, and it was the sole point of focus for a three-week-long exhibition for which he charged a twenty-five-cent admission. Church wanted the viewing of his painting to be an immersive experience, so he surrounded the giant canvas with potted palm trees and put up curtains around the perimeter to create the illusion that the viewer was looking through a window, gazing into the far distance. The room was darkened, allowing the painting to be specially lit for maximum effect, and benches were provided so that its viewers might sit and study it, peruse its intricate details, and meditate on its meanings. He even provided opera glasses for closer inspection of his enormous canvas. During its time of exhibition more than twelve thousand people lined up to see it. On the final day of the exhibition the crowds were so large that they blocked the street and the police had to be called in to manage the traffic.
After its successful showing in New York, The Heart of the Andes was exhibited in other major US cities and in London, where it was also much admired. Eventually the painting was sold for ten thousand dollars, at that time the highest price ever paid for a work by a living American artist. It has now taken its place as a highlight in the American collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Frederic Edwin Church was born in 1826. When his artistic talents were recognized, his supportive parents sent him to live and study with painter Thomas Cole. Church was to be Thomas Cole’s only student and became, at the peak of his career, the most famous of the Hudson River School of landscape painters. Where Cole was interested in the allegories he found in nature, Church was more interested in apprehending the beauty of the natural world and letting it speak for itself. He focused solely on landscapes, and perfected a style that combined closely observed realism with a Romantic flourish. Like Cole, Church believed that nature would speak of the Creator to those with ears to hear. His pastor, Horace Bushnell, once wrote, “The whole world is a ‘hieroglyph’ whose solution is the being of God.”1 It was this mysterious presence of God that Church sought to unveil in his majestic landscapes, and he brought a sense of mystery and wonder to every landscape he painted.
The Heart of the Andes by Frederic Church, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City [Wikimedia Commons, CC-PD-Mark]
Church’s paintings are crowded with intricate detail and rendered with painstaking care; every brushstroke counts. Sometimes his landscapes captured a moment of restful serenity, but more often they reflected the awesome power of nature, especially in paintings like Cotopaxi (1862), which shows an erupting volcanic mountain as the sun burns through the haze of its smoke; The Icebergs (1861) with its towering mountains of ice, mist, and a threatening sky; or Niagara (1857), which portrays the ferocious dizzying power of the famous falls. While Niagara Falls had long been a favorite subject for painters, Church chose to paint it from a unique perspective. In his painting there is no foreground. The viewer is not viewing the falls from a safe distance, but is visually thrust into the very place where the water plunges over the rocks. Given the massive size of the painting, the viewer cannot but feel something akin to vertigo—as though they are about to be swept over the rim and pulled directly into the drama of the torrential fall of the water.
One of the reasons that Church was so successful in his depiction of nature was his status as an amateur naturalist himself. He was intrigued by the inner workings of the natural world and especially fascinated by the sciences of botany and geology. He was an avid reader of the work of German scientist Alexander von Humboldt, and retraced some of von Humboldt’s travels in his own journeys. During his lifetime Church traveled all over the world, seeking fresh natural glories to affix to canvas, including trips to South America, the Arctic, the tropics, mountainous locations in Europe, and the Middle East. Then he rendered what he saw with precision and a feeling for the mystery inherent in the beauty. While he always painted nature in all its fine detail, one cannot help but feel that the physical objects are not in themselves the true focus of the paintings. The mountains, valleys, skies, clouds, trees, and foliage are themselves the canvas on which he paints a deeper reality, and the clue to that deeper reality is his obsession with painting the effects of light.
Church was fascinated with light, and painted the many varieties of its drama—the array of vivid color seen at the rising or setting of the sun, blowsy clouds scudding across the sky or billowing in the distance, rays of light slanting down through a parting of dark clouds, hazy light on a far horizon, mirror-like reflections off still water, fractured light sparkling and dancing upon moving water, rainbows arching across the heavens, the strangeness of the aurora borealis, shimmering light on the leaves of trees, or spotlighting a meadow amid the threat of a coming storm. For Church, light was not just a physical reality but the spiritual aura that surrounded the created world. Beyond nature there was something ineffable that he sought to capture with his brushstrokes. Because Church was a committed Christian of the Dutch Reformed variety, there was always a spiritual dimension to his paintings. His was an essentially sacramental vision, where the presence of God cast a glow over the natural world.
Although Church very rarely placed any human beings in his paintings, and if he did they were the merest specks on the landscape, he sometimes included a cross in the middle of the expansive vistas he composed, as he did in To the Memory of Thomas Cole (1848), Cross in the Wilderness (1857), and The Heart of the Andes. At other times blasted trees or the mast of a ship echo the form of this central Christian symbol. Including a cross was about as far as he would go in making his paintings explicitly religious, though in a very real sense every brushstroke he made was in service to his vision of God’s presence in nature.
At the height of his fame, Church was the most famous artist in the United States. But before the end of his career people’s tastes began to change, and his work, and that of the other Hudson River painters, largely fell out of favor. Such are the vicissitudes of the art world. Even so, he continued to paint until arthritis crippled his hands and made it nearly impossible for him to handle a brush. His last great work of art was not a painting, but a building—Olana, the home he had constructed according to his own design on the top of a hill overlooking the Hudson River. Its architecture was inspired by his travels, and especially by the Persian style he so admired. Constructed to look like a combination of a castle and an ancient fortress, it was accented with pointed arches, multicolored brickwork designs, and various other embellishments. From its porch he could look out upon the winding Hudson River that he had painted so many times and be reminded of the sublime beauty that came from the hand of his God.