![]() 2 The exhibition makes implicit comparisons between these painted scenes associated with ancient civilizations and biblical texts and his earlier canvases depicting the landmarks of North and South America, arguing for a career-defining shift from natural history to human history. 1872 Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, NY). 1870 Olana State Historic Site, Hudson, NY) and Olana from the Southwest (c. 1 The home and grounds are here represented by a handful of studies such as East Façade, Olana (c. Before his departure Church had acquired the property and consulted with Richard Morris Hunt to construct a French château, but upon his return he “designed the house myself” to embody his immersion in Islamic architecture. The closing segment was devoted to Olana, the artist’s magnificent country estate overlooking the Hudson River that was inspired by his Middle Eastern travels. ![]() For each geographic location, the large, finished painting was hung with related small studies, allowing the viewer to follow the artist’s extended engagement with this key site from on-the-spot observations to studio productions. Frederic Church: A Painter’s Pilgrimage opens new vistas onto a lesser-known aspect of this renowned artist’s career and rewards us with new understanding of his quest to render these sacred spaces for himself and his American public.įocusing on this later episode in Church’s career, this exhibition invited the visitor to follow his journey by moving through the galleries where the visitor encountered a succession of major paintings conceived of Rome, Athens, Jerusalem, Petra and Syria, and its environs. Human activity as complex and varied as a pilgrimage, however, has no universally accepted definition. A pilgrimage is a journey made as an act of religious devotion to a location of import to the person’s faith and beliefs. His life and art universally possessed a spiritual dimension. He also enjoyed close friendships with ministers the Rev. Church’s adherence to the precepts of the Congregational Church remained strong throughout his life, even to the point of refraining from painting on the Sabbath. And following the horrors of the Civil War, he and his wife lost their two young children to diphtheria, a tragedy that would have shaken even faith as strong as theirs. He was no longer a bachelor on his own but was now traveling with his family, transitioning from explorer to tourist. Acclaimed in the 1850s as the greatest of American painters, he was being eclipsed in the late sixties by a younger, European-trained generation and was therefore in search of fresh inspiration. The question of what motivated Church’s travels to the Levant is complicated, as he-like most artists-left little in the way of direct explanation for his actions. Carr, independent scholar and Mercedes Volait, director of the research center InVisu at the Institut national d’histoire de l’art, Paris. Avery, senior research scholar at The Metropolitan Museum of Art Gerald L. ![]() For the related book, Myers assembled an expert team of authors: Kevin J. Exploring in depth the nineteen months that Church explored Europe and the Holy Land, the exhibition features seventy artworks created out of those experiences, produced from the late 1860s through the early 1880s. The exhibition opened at the Detroit Institute of Arts, where Myers is curator of American art, then traveled to Reynolda House Museum of American Art in Winston-Salem, NC, and ended the tour at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT. Where did Church and his family visit? What were the artistic results of his investigations? And what motivated this Old World quest of America’s leading landscapist? To answer these questions Kenneth John Myers organized a thoughtful and visually stimulating exhibition and related publication-the first to focus exclusively on that trip-entitled Frederic Church: A Painter’s Pilgrimage. It was, however, just as daring for an American landscape painter to depart in 1867 for almost two years in the region as it was for Lawrence in 1909 to join an archaeological excavation in Syria and eventually the Arab Revolt. 1) in a carefully rendered costume, wielding a dagger, reinforces the association.) Of course Church had his year-old son perched in front of him, his wife nearby on a donkey, and his mother-in-law not far away. (Church’s stunning rendering of a Standing Bedouin (1868 fig. Lawrence left London for Damascus, famously donning Arab garb and heading across the desert on the back of a camel, Frederic Church (1826–1900) was photographed at Beirut, his head wrapped in a sun-protective scarf astride his dromedary, ready to set off on his exploration of the Holy Land. Church, 2-aĪlmost a half century before T. Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, Gift of Louis P. Brush and oil, graphite on paper, 13 7/8 x 10 5/16 in. Frederic Edwin Church, Standing Bedouin, probably February 1868.
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