In paintings of Cole's like The Oxbow (1835-6), the landscape is at once depicted in hyper-naturalistic detail and presented as a symbol of all the hopes and contradictions of American settler culture. Cole, Church's artistic and spiritual mentor, had been visiting the Hudson Valley since 1825 to make sketches for his work. The landscape of upstate New York was of vital significance to the American school of landscape painting that coalesced around the figure of Thomas Cole during the 1820s-40s. His presence serves as a fulcrum, offering the viewer a point of access into the scene, and presenting the landscape as a vessel for human desires and expectations. 1818) - contemplates the world spread out before him. The clouds are streaked with reddish light, while the figure in the foreground - turned away from the viewer to observe the landscape, a motif familiar from earlier European works such as Caspar David Friedrich's Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (c. A crescent-like break in the rocky terrain opens out onto the Valley, as the silver sliver of the Hudson River glistens far below. In keeping with Church's Romantic heritage, the piece is subtly but carefully composed. This atmospheric sunrise is exemplary of Church's early work, and of the influence of Thomas Cole in particular. This went hand in hand with a desire to document, taxonomize and understand the landscape at a scientific level.ฤก849 Morning, Looking East over the Hudson Valley to the Catskill Mountains As a member of the second generation of Hudson River School painters, Church's work enacts a movement away from the symbolic unity of the first-generation painters such as Cole - in which each element of the landscape has a coded allegorical value - towards a purer emphasis on the natural scene.His oeuvre is synonymous with the confident, inquisitive, sometimes astonished gaze of the nineteenth century West upon the rest of the world, and pulsates with the energy of discovery. Whereas Cole's travels were restricted largely to the United States, Church's artistic tours took him to exotic and remote locations, from the Arctic Circle to the Middle East. If Thomas Cole's paintings made the Hudson River Valley famous, Frederic Edwin Church made the painters of the Hudson River Valley famous for painting the world.In this sense, his work is related to the subgenre of American Romantic landscape painting known as Luminism, though it lacks that style's emphasis on calm and stillness. His work became renowned not only for its meticulous rendering of landscape, but for the equal attention it lavished on sunlight, moonlight, cloud, mist, and other intangible qualities of location. Frederic Edwin Church was one of the most gifted painters of light and air of the Romantic period.
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