Destiny Manifest

His prominence lasted little more than a decade, but while it did Frederic Edwin Church caught the imagination of the American public as no other U.S. painter had before. In the 1850s, his eloquent flair for embodying the nation's grand notion of "manifest destiny" made his paintings public events. On one day alone in 1857, Horace Greeley, George Bancroft, George Ripley, Henry Ward Beecher and Charles A. Dana were among the crowds that filed past Church's Niagara. Two years later, the throngs that flocked to his studio to see The Heart of the Andes were so dense that policemen were required to keep pedestrian traffic moving. The price it commanded, $10,000, was the highest paid up to that date for a painting by a living American artist. Yet when Church died in 1900, his fame had been so eclipsed that obituaries noted, "the fact that he was still alive had been almost forgotten by present-day artists."

Clarion Call. For the first time since his death, Church's place in U.S. painting is being reassessed with a large exhibition at the Albany Institute of History and Art.* Historically, Church ranks as virtually the last of the Hudson River School. A pupil of Thomas Cole, he took as a personal command Emerson's clarion call to the American artist to reveal the hidden spirituality of the universe, to create art worthy of a new continent. Most of his generation traveled to the Old World; Church forayed into the New. Instead of Europe, he visited Ecuador, hacked through jungles, inspected volcanoes, navigated rivers, making hundreds of drawings of nature.

To better convey nature's transcendental grandeur, Church soon began rearranging it. Rainy Season in the Tropics (opposite), painted after a trip to Jamaica, is an imaginary landscape, setting the Andes amid the lush tropical vegetation of the Caribbean. With its double-arched rainbow and rain-cleansed atmosphere, says Smith Professor David Huntington, author of the recently published The Landscapes of Frederic Edwin Church, it represents "the ne plus ultra of hope, an Alpine Genesis."

"Our Place on High." After the Civil War, such vaunted idealism fell into disfavor. In his last decades, Church painted little, concentrated instead on making an artistic "Center of the World" out of his Hudson River estate. At Olana (thought to be a corruption of the Arabic meaning "our place on high"), Church once again spoke superbly for his age. An eclectic marvel combining elements of Italian villa, Gothic revival, Ruskinian Venetian, French mansard, the mansion stands amid 327 acres of woods and meadow, chock-full of Oriental rugs, Thonet chairs, Tiffany glass and Persian tiles.

An amazingly successful polyglot of the tastes of the times, it was occupied by his daughter-in-law until her death in 1964. Scholars hoped that it would one day be open to the public; now, unless a committee hastily formed to preserve it succeeds in raising $350,000 ($100,000 has already been pledged) by July, Olana will be doomed by the wrecker's ball.

* Organized by the Smithsonian Institution's National Collection of Fine Arts, the show will travel to Manhattan's Knoedler gallery in June.

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