Artwork of the Week: August 11
A vast body of water glistens before us, reflecting the brilliant morning light of a rising sun. Tropical trees, vines, and ferns proliferate on the banks of this lake, conveying a sense of seemingly endless growth. Lush green plateaus and ridges stretch into the background before becoming obscured by the morning haze. A snow-capped mountain peak in the distance crowns the scene, adding to this expansiveness. In the foreground, a lone woman sits beside an urn with a small dog curled up nearby, their minuscule size further amplifying the scale of the towering vegetation above them.
In 1853, Frederic Edwin Church embarked on the first of two expeditions to South America. There, he would explore the continent’s diverse terrain, making detailed sketches as he went. Church was heeding the call of Alexander von Humboldt, an influential naturalist who advised artists to visit South America to study the natural world. Made from an amalgamation of different terrains and climates, the composite worlds of Church’s paintings represented the grand scope of nature in rich, meticulous detail. These grand, theatrical paintings would earn Church his fame in the 1850s and 1860s, attracting swarms of opera-glass-wielding viewers eager for the chance to analyze the impressive detail of such works.
However, Church’s once-celebrated paintings came to be seen as outmoded by the 1870s. Later in his career, Church began painting landscapes of Olana, his estate in upstate New York. Yet, an irrepressible yearning for the tropics would bring him back to his studies of South America, and the result would be this painting: a nostalgic return by Church to the subject matter that had made him famous those decades earlier.
For further reading, see Erin Monroe, “Morning in the Tropics,” in The Sense of Beauty: Six Centuries of Painting from Museo de Arte de Ponce (Museo de Arte de Ponce, 2025), 106, 185; Franklin Kelly et al., Frederic Edwin Church (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1989); Julia B. Rosenbaum, “Frederic Edwin Church in an Era of Expedition,” American Art 29, no. 2 (2015): 26–34; Kevin J. Avery, “Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900) - The Metropolitan Museum of Art,” August 1, 2009, https://www.metmuseum.org/essays/frederic-edwin-church-1826-1900; “The 19th-Century Blockbuster: Frederic Edwin Church’s ‘Niagara’ | National Gallery of Art,” August 4, 2023, https://www.nga.gov/stories/articles/19th-century-blockbuster-frederic-edwin-churchs-niagara; Jennifer Raab, Frederic Church: The Art and Science of Detail (Yale University Press, 2015); and Rachael Z. DeLue, “Humboldt’s Picture Theory,” American Art 31, no. 2 (2017): 37–40.
This work is currently on display in the exhibition The Sense of Beauty.
