Frederic Edwin Church: A Great Landscape Painting Teacher

There are few American painters who were as celebrated, successful, or influential as Frederic Edwin Church. While many of his contemporaries died broke, discredited, or forgotten, Church managed to live a prosperous life until the end of an era that was shaped by his influence on artists, collectors, and museums. That influence continues today through frequent exhibitions, scholarly catalogues, and illustrated books. Even now there are major exhibitions that include his drawings and paintings as well as several books still in print that describe his painting techniques and the ways he managed his successful career.

Church's influence isn't based on his having been an innovative painter or an active teacher. Instead, it emanates from his powerfully executed paintings of both well-known sites and exotic locations; from his influence as a founder of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York City, and as a member of the National Academy, also in New York City; and from the efforts of collectors to make a vast number of his sketches available to art students.

Church's method of developing large studio pictures was typical of most 19th-century artists. He made detailed graphite drawings and oil sketches on location and acquired photographs of those scenes to compose oil paintings in his New York studio. He even went so far as to paint over someone else's photographic prints to compose his most popular painting of Niagara Falls. What helped Church stand out in the crowd of painters was his instinct for establishing arresting compositions, his preference for dramatic lighting and intriguing details, and his brilliant marketing strategies.


Church's Dependence on Drawings & Oil Sketches
Art historian Elaine Evans Dee offered a complete explanation of Church's process in a catalogue titled Frederic E. Church: Under Changing Skies, which accompanied a 1992 exhibition of oil sketches and drawings from the Cooper-Hewitt, National Museum of Design, Smithsonian Institution. "Frederic Church's approach to his art was direct, intellectual, and practical," wrote Dee. "He studied nature at first hand and prided himself on translating what he saw to paper and canvas. He selected for the pictures he painted in his studio those aspects of his drawings that best suited their composition, but only after he had educated himself thoroughly about the subject through every means at his command. Drawings formed the basis of Church's art.

"His preferred medium for drawing was graphite (pencil) in various hardnesses," Dee continued. "Pen and ink rarely appear and watercolor almost never. Graphite often occurs in conjunction with white gouache, particularly on dark papers. The white gouache was used to highlight or to define form and was especially suitable for clouds, water, and ice.