The Heart of the Andes

Nineteenth-century landscape paintings in the Americas were prompted by a desire to depict the hemisphere’s most remote regions, and were largely informed by scientific inquiry...

Frederic Edwin Church’s great painting The Icebergs (fig. 1), the subject of this book, affirms this epigraph. The story of The Icebergs is a kaleidoscope—of talent, adventure, and eye-popping spectacle; of science, colonialism, and multinational wishful thinking...

The decade of the 1850s was, for many, a period of a satisfying coming of age. The Industrial Revolution, which had developed in the United States a bit later than in England, had matured, and the nation was on its way to being a global economic presence (despite a financial depression in 1857). The Gadsden Purchase in 1853 transferred Mexican land (this time without going to war) to the US...

~FREDERIC CHURCH (1826–1900) was born into a society that valued education. In the northern part of the United States, particularly in New England, the surging democratic tide of the second quarter of the nineteenth century brought...

Frederic Church's earliest and most formative trip took him not to Europe but to South America. In 1853, he traveled through Ecuador and Colombia with his...

The African-American artist Robert S. Duncanson painted landscapes in the style of the Hudson River School. Whether representing the Catskills, the Andes, or the Ohio River Valley, the so-called Hudson River School artists depicted locations in which forests, lakes, mountains, and streams stretched off into infinity and in which humans, if present at all, were mere bystanders at nature’s...