Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900) was one of the most prominent American landscape painters of the 19th century. A prolific and successful artist, Church produced epic scenes that captivated audiences and received great critical acclaim. He also made a large number of preparatory drawings and oil sketches - smaller works of art that reveal the artist's fluency in recording the natural world and serve as a testament to his scientific interests in geology and atmospheric effects. While Church sold most of his finished paintings, he retained representative examples of his work to adorn his home, Olana, an elaborate Persian-influenced castle perched on a hilltop overlooking the Hudson River in New York.

Organized by Kevin J. Avery, Associate Curator of American Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Treasures from Olana features 18 paintings by Church that the artist kept or reacquired for his own home and personal collection. Mostly intimate landscape studies and oil sketches, the paintings trace the arc of Church's career - from an early scene of the Catskill Mountains and studies of the dramatic New England sky, to vignettes from his travels abroad and later views of the landscape around his beloved home. These canvases tell the story of the artist through his own work and form the basis of this exhibition, which marks the first time that these paintings have traveled as a group.

Born in Hartford, Connecticut, Church was studying drawing and painting by the age of 16. Two years later, Thomas Cole, the father of the Hudson River School, took Church as his student. The young artist learned quickly and by 1848, he had his own studio. Typically, Church would travel and make detailed sketches during the spring through the autumn. In the winter, he would settle down to work on larger paintings, using his many sketches as references for his more idealized, epic compositions.

In the 1850s, Church visited a number of places that provided the subject matter for his most successful paintings. In addition to sketching trips throughout the northeastern United States and Canada, he twice went to South America. The paintings he derived from these trips brought him to the forefront of his profession. For the next decade, he devoted a great deal of attention to South American subjects, producing a celebrated series that became the basis of his ensuing international fame. Twelve thousand people saw his acclaimed painting The Heart of the Andes (1859; The Metropolitan Museum of Art) in New York during the first three weeks of May 1859 before it embarked on a two-year, paid-admission tour of Britain and eight other American cities. While touring The Heart of the Andes, Church met Isabel Carnes. The couple married in 1860, the same year that Church purchased the farmland in Hudson, New York that was to become his beloved home, Olana.

In 1865, the Churches lost their first two children to diphtheria. Shortly thereafter, Frederic and Isabel made a recuperative trip to Jamaica; and in 1866, they had another son. The following year, the family launched an 18-month journey to Europe, North Africa, the Near East, and Greece. The oil studies that Church made on this trip led to a number of important paintings, but the following decade saw a downturn in Church's successes as a painter. From the 1870s until his death, Church was afflicted with painful rheumatism, which hindered his work on major pictures. He still managed paint, but his efforts were increasingly focused on his home and his family, which came to include four children.

About 1880, Frederic and Isabel Church named their home "Olana," a variant of the word "Olane" used to describe a "fortress" or "treasury-storehouse" in ancient Persia. While Church painted some of his most important canvases at Olana, the house itself absorbed much of his creative energy in his later years. The paintings that Church selected for his home were an integral part of the interior that the artist so carefully orchestrated to reflect his interests, travels, and aesthetic taste. Their wide variety shows the master in all phases of his career, in sketches and finished paintings, depicting the breadth of his subjects and the great technical skill that established him as an eminent and influential artist.

As one of the few intact homes of an American artist, Olana is now one of the most important artistic residences in the United States, designated a National Historic Landmark in 1970. This exhibition, composed of works normally on view at Olana, coincides with a major restoration of its interior. More information on Frederic Church and his Victorian castle is available at www.olana.org.

Inspired by the exhibition Treasures from Olana, The Huntington has mounted this special installation of Chimborazo (1864), its own masterpiece by Frederic Church, to provide visitors with the opportunity to consider this monumental canvas in a broader context.

In painting Chimborazo, Church drew inspiration from the German naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859). Humboldt explored South America from 1799 to 1804 and described his journey from a scientific point of view in extensive texts. His observations led him to hypothesize that nature existed in a state of interdependent harmony. The theory that the cosmos exhibited a grand and understandable design appealed to the spiritual nature of Church, who often imbued his landscapes with references to the divine. Humboldt likened the grandeur of Mount Chimborazo to Michelangelo's dome of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, an analogy with a religious connotation Church would have appreciated.

Mount Chimborazo (pronounced chim-bo-RAH-zo) played an important role in forming Humboldt's ideas. Until the beginning of the 19th century, Chimborazo was thought to be the highest mountain on earth, with an elevation of approximately 20,700 ft. Its great height and location near the Equator result in an extraordinary level of biodiversity within a relatively small geographic area, providing Humboldt with evidence of nature's harmony. For Humboldt, the advantage of looking at Chimborazo from below—the vantage point Church selected for the painting Chimborazo—was that one ascends visually through the three ecosystems Humboldt believed constituted the world, from the torrid rain forest, to the temperate grasslands, to the frigid snow-clad peak. The ascent of Chimborazo, real or imagined, places the entire natural world before the viewer.

In Humboldt's most famous treatise, Cosmos, he encouraged artists to travel to the Equator and other ecologically significant areas to transform his ideas into paintings. On his first trip to South America in 1853, Church followed Humboldt's route through the Andes, stopping at locations the naturalist featured in accounts of his travels. On the artist's second excursion to South America, in 1857, he spent all of his time in Ecuador and was able to sketch Chimborazo from a number of different vantage points. Church started out from Guayaquil, approximately 90 miles to its southwest, and traveled north to Guaranda and Guanajo, within 15 miles of the mountain. Church then skirted Chimborazo's southern and eastern slopes, sketching in Mocha, a village approximately 10 miles northeast of the mountain, and stopped in the town of Riobamba, about 15 miles to Chimborazo's southeast. He used the studies of Chimborazo from a variety of perspectives to create the composite view of the mountain that appears in The Heart of the Andes (1859; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) and in Chimborazo.

Humboldt researched plant life in South America to demonstrate connections within and among ecosystems. Church, interested in botanical detail from early in his career, also made studies of South American flora. The foreground of Chimborazo teems with plants, many of which are identifiable: Xanthosoma, bananas, bamboo, palms, and Carludovica palmata, used to make Panama hats. However, just as the composition of Chimborazo is a composite view, Church also blended plants from different locations or combined attributes of different species when it suited him. While Church was exacting in his presentation of specific details of plants, the scientific accuracy of his renderings took second place to his attempt to convey the whole experience of Ecuador to his audience.

Church felt strongly that presentation of a painting was an important part of viewers' experience of his work, and he regularly involved himself in the selection and design of his frames. For large, dramatic paintings such as Heart of the Andes and Chimborazo, he tended to favor ornate styles and patterned borders. Both wide and deep, they emphasize the sense of depth in the paintings, suggesting that one is looking though a window to the landscape beyond. Historic photographs of Chimborazo in the home of its original owner, William H. Osborn, reveal that it originally had an elaborate Church-designed frame. The painting descended through the Osborn family until it was purchased by the Virginia Steele Scott Foundation for The Huntington. Sometime before Chimborazo came to The Huntington in 1989, the original frame was removed from the painting and lost. Based on extensive research, The Huntington commissioned Eli Wilner & Co. to create a reproduction of the original frame, which makes its debut in conjunction with this special installation. At the close of the exhibition, Chimborazo, in its new "old" frame, will return to the Virginia Steele Scott Gallery where it is a highlight of The Huntington's permanent collection of American art.

Jessica Todd Smith, Virginia Steele Scott Curator of American Art
Kevin M. Murphy, Bradford and Christine Mishler Curatorial Fellow in American Art

Curator Talk and Tour:
The Art of Plants in Landscapes by Frederic Edwin Church

Tuesday, October 24, 2006 5:00-6:30 p.m.

The sublime landscapes of Frederic Church and the plants that inspired him will share the bill in this two-part event. First, Jessica Todd Smith, Virginia Steele Scott Curator of American Art, will talk about the artist and his work as she leads a tour through the exhibition, "Treasures from Olana: Landscapes by Frederic Edwin Church." This will be followed by a walk through the Rose Hills Foundation Conservatory for Botanical Science where Dylan Hannon, Curator of the Conservatory and Tropical Collections, will discuss some of the plants so beautifully depicted in Church's paintings.

Members: $25 Non Members: $35
Registration: 626.405.2128

The Robert R. Wark Lecture:
The Center of the World: Frederic Church, Olana and its Landscapes

Thursday, October 26, 2006, 6:30 p.m.

Olana became Church's private museum of his experience and art, and he adorned it with many of his most vivid oil sketches of natural phenomena, studies for several of his major works. Kevin J. Avery, Associate Curator of American Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, will examine the life and career of Frederic Edwin Church from the perspective of the hilltop estate he fashioned for himself and his family.

Friends Hall. Free.

Landscape Painting Series:
Plein Air in Watercolor

Saturdays, October 21 and 28, 2006, 1:00-4:00 p.m.

Learn to paint landscapes on location in this watercolor series with artist Robert Sherrill. Taking inspiration from the exhibition "Treasures from Olana: Landscapes by Frederic Edwin Church," students will go out into the gardens to study the basics of picture making, from selecting a scene to perspective, atmosphere, and use of color.

Members: $145 Non Members: $165
Registration: 626.405.2128

Fall Lecture for Sponsoring Members and Above (by invitation only):
Setting a Jewel: Framing 19th- and Early 20th-Century Paintings

Monday, October 30, 2006

Suzanne Smeaton, Director of Eli Wilner and Company, New York, will present a comprehensive view of the evolution of American frame design and construction between the years 1820 and 1920, with a special focus on the story of the replication of the original frame for Chimborazo, The Huntington's painting by Frederic Church.

For membership information, please contact the Membership Office at 626.405.2124.

Public Lecture:
Anatomical Vision: The Art of George Stubbs and Thomas Eakins

Wednesday, December 13, 2006, 7:30 p.m.

Although they worked a century and an ocean apart, the English artist George Stubbs (1724-1806) and the American artist Thomas Eakins (1844-1917) shared a common approach to their art. Jules Prown, Paul Mellon Professor Emeritus of the history of art, Yale University, will discuss how they were driven to understand anatomy, not only as a mode of realistic depiction of their subjects, but as an imperative to seek reality beneath surface appearances.

Friends Hall. Free.

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