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Church rose to that challenge – and his final study for the Heart of the Andes is on view at Olana. Humboldt had explicitly called for a painter to visualize his ideas. Humboldt thought this akin to a glimpse of the Garden of Eden. Humboldt proposed that in the mountainous equatorial regions of South America, the unified workings of all terrestrial and celestial phenomena can be observed.
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The Heart of the Andes is Church’s response to reading Cosmos the widely read work of the German naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt (1769 – 1859). Each element is geologically or botanically accurate, but the painting shows the magnificent breath of topography and botany. The finished painting is a summary of Ecuador. His Heart of the Andes, 1859 is not a literal depiction of a location in Ecuador for this work, Church artfully combined sketches from a variety of places – views of Chimborazo, drawings of a waterfall near Hacienda Chillo and palm trees and banana stalks sketched from Guayaquil. He traveled the world – the eastern United States, Colombia, Ecuador, Newfoundland, Labrador, Jamaica, and Mexico with pencil and oils, producing very accurate depictions of what he saw, working both en plein air and from memory shortly after returning indoors. In Church’s masterwork Niagara, 1857, he manipulated the falls, pushing down the near side to show the effects of water crashing on the far side and suspending the viewer in mid-air to intensify the grandeur of the falls.Ĭhurch was an artist-explorer.
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Church and the Hudson River School artists did not just depict views instead, paintings were carefully arranged to celebrate the splendor of nature as a resource for spiritual renewal and an expression of national identity.