Anchoring the center is a tree blasted by lightning, a familiar motif in the art of Church suggesting the awe-inducing power of nature. A fine example of the latter is Wood Interior on Mount Turner (about 1877), an informal yet deft depiction of a cluster of tree trunks, some living and others dead. Depicting impressive peaks, windswept coasts, dramatic sunsets, as well as solitary trees and rock formations, his resultant sketches capture expansive vistas and intimate corners. An avid outdoorsman, Church camped, hiked, rode horses, canoed, and fished during these visits, but most imperative was his professional objective to record scenery. Olana State Historic Site, Hudson, NY, Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation OL.1980.1869Ĭhurch enjoyed a long-standing love affair with Maine, which he described as “magnificent both land and seaward.” Over the 30-year period from 1850 to 1880, he made more than a dozen trips to the state’s Katahdin region and Mount Desert Island. Oil and graphite on paper mounted on canvas 31.3 x 51.6 cm. Frederic Edwin Church (American, 1826–1900). Created on the eve of the Civil War, when its outbreak appeared inevitable, the painting’s subject can be perceived as symbolically evoking the coming conflagration indeed, one scholar has memorably described the painting as a “natural apocalypse.” Other interpretations include the possibility that Twilight in the Wilderness references the increasingly threatened state of our country’s unspoiled natural environment, already an issue during the artist’s day. Two sketches from Olana that closely relate to Twilight in the Wilderness are highlighted in the exhibition.Īlthough Church often extolled the breathtaking beauty and sublimity of America’s pristine wilderness in his work, our painting appears to have additional overtones, particularly because twilight is a transitional time so visibly evolving toward an end. Olana State Historic Site is a historic house museum and landscape in Greenport, New York, near the city of Hudson. Even if the exact scene it depicts is open to debate-in fact, some historians surmise it may be a composite view of multiple locations-it is known that the artist painted the canvas in his New York studio, partly basing it on sketches he produced during travels near Mount Katahdin in Maine. ![]() Cloaked amid quickening nightfall, its foreground features a dark crimson lake flanked by masses of dramatically twisted and attenuated trees. Rendered with a scientific realism that reflects Church’s abiding interest in natural history, Twilight in the Wilderness is a spectacular view of a blazing sunset over a distant purple mountain. Several are on public view for the first time. This fall we showcase the majestic work in a special focus exhibition, Maine Sublime: Frederic Church’s Twilight in the Wilderness, displaying it alongside nearly two dozen drawn and painted sketches from the artist’s own private collection at Olana, his historic home, studio, and landscaped property on the Hudson River. Marlatt Fund 1965.233įrederic Edwin Church was one of our country’s consummate artistic talents, and his masterpiece, Twilight in the Wilderness (1860), ranks among the Cleveland Museum of Art’s most admired paintings. Despite the small size of Church's oil sketches and studies of the view from Olana, they remain among the most memorable images in his work.Twilight in the Wilderness 1860. Seen from the vicinity of the house's south entrance (called the "Ombra"), the Hudson River broadens into a "lake" (which Church opted visually to repeat, in digging the pond at the foot of his hill) and the Catskill foothills taper off into the Shawangunk Mountains beyond. Though he would eventually travel the world over and make vast paintings of South American volcanoes and cloud forests, northern icebergs and auroras, and the ancient cities of the Orient, Church returned again and again, in every season, to the view southwest of his estate-especially when he began to build and, with his family, live in his castle. ![]() There Cole and he had rambled and sketched together in Church's youth as a landscape painter. It embraced the Hudson River and its valley, overlooking, to the west, the Catskill home of his late teacher, the Hudson River School founder, Thomas Cole, and the indelible Catskill Mountain range beyond. Well before he designed and built the spectacle of his house, Church had fixed on the spectacle from the hill. "Almost an hour this side of Albany is the Center of the world-I own it." The boaster was Frederic Edwin Church, perhaps the most renowned of second-generation Hudson River School painters, and the "Center of the world" was the summit of the Sienghenburgh, in Hudson, New York, which became the site of his exotic home, Olana. Avery, Senior Research Scholar, The Metropolitan Museum of Art ![]() Site #2 Olana State Historic Site Introduction by Kevin J.
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