Oil on canvas
Reynolda House, Museum of American Art, Winston Salem, North Carolina.
Original Purchase Fund from
Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation, Z Smith Reynolds Foundation,
ARCA Foundation, and Anne Cannon Forsyth, 1966
> Artist's biography |
This is Church's largest canvas to date.
The vast scale of South American scenery evidently had a direct influence on his perception of the function of size in
painting.
In its composition this subject reflects that preoccupation.
The rocks and mountains are pushed to the edges of the canvas by the light-laden atmosphere intervening between
the eye and every object.
One critic wrote of the picture in explicitly religious terms: 'Seldom has a more grand effect of light been depicted...
it literally floods the canvas with celestial fire, and beams with glory like a sublime psalm of light.' |
Room 7: Explorations
Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900)