The Heart of the Andes

Infobox Painting|

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backcolor=#FBF5DF
painting_alignment=right
image_size=350px
title=The Heart of the Andes
artist=Frederic Edwin Church
year=1859
type=Oil on canvas
height=167.9
width=302.9
height_inch=68⅛
width_inch=119¼
museum=Metropolitan Museum of Art

"The Heart of the Andes" is a large oil-on-canvas landscape painting by the American artist Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900). More than five feet (1.7 metres) high and almost ten feet (3 metres) wide, it depicts an idealized landscape in the South American Andes, where Church traveled on two occasions. Its exhibition in 1859 was a sensation, and the painting established Church as the foremost landscape painter in the United States.cite book|title=American Art: History and Culture|author=Craven, Wayne|year=2002|publisher=McGraw-Hill Professional|isbn=0071415246|pages=pp. 207–209] It is now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and is among Church's most renowned works.

Background

In 1853 and again in 1857, Church traveled in Ecuador and Colombia, financed by businessman Cyrus West Field, who wished to use Church's paintings to lure investors to his South American ventures. Church was inspired by the Prussian naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt, and his 1845 treatise "Kosmos". Humboldt was among the last of the scientific generalists, and his fame was similar to that of Albert Einstein a century later. In the second volume of "Kosmos", Humboldt included a chapter on the influence of landscape painting on the study of the natural world—ranking that art among the highest expressions of the love of nature—and challenging artists to portray the "physiognomy" of the landscape.cite journal|title=Scientific Sources of the Full-Length Landscape: 1850|author=Gardner, Albert Ten Eyck |journal=The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, New Series|volume=4|number=2|year=Oct. 1945|pages=59–65|doi=10.2307/3257164] cite book|author=Büttner, Nils|title=Landscape Painting: A History|pages=pp. 283–285|publisher=Abbeville Press Publishers|location=New York|year=2006|other=trans. Russell Stockman|isbn=0-7892-0902-0] Church retraced Humboldt's travels in South America.

Description and interpretation

"The Heart of the Andes" is a composite of the South American topography observed by Church during his travels. At the center right of the mountain landscape is a shimmering pool served by a waterfall. The snow-capped, majestic Mount Chimborazo of Ecuador appears in the distance; the viewer's eye is led to it by the darker, closer slopes that decline from right to left. The evidence of human presence consists of a hamlet and church lying in the central plain, and closer to the foreground, two natives kneel before a cross. Church's signature appears cut into the bark of the highlighted foreground tree.

Church's landscape conformed to the aesthetic principles of the "picturesque", as propounded by the British theorist William Gilpin, which began with a careful observation of nature that was then enhanced by particular notions about composition and harmony. The juxtaposition of smooth and irregular forms was an important principle, and is represented in "The Heart of the Andes" by the rounded hills and pool of water on the one hand, and by the contrasting jagged mountains, rough trees, and the other diagonal forms on the other.

The theory of British critic John Ruskin was also an important influence on Church. Ruskin's "Modern Painters" was a five-volume treatise on art that was, according to American artist Worthington Whittredge, "in every landscape painter's hand" by mid-century. [cite journal|title=John Ruskin and Artistical Geology in America|author=Wagner, Virginia L.|journal= Winterthur Portfolio|volume=23|issue=2/3|year=Summer–Autumn, 1988|pages=151–167|doi=10.1086/496374] Ruskin emphasized the scrutiny of nature , and he viewed art, morality, and the natural world as spiritually unified. Following this theme, the painting displays the landscape in detail at all scales, from the intricate foliage, birds, and butterflies in the foreground to the all-encompassing portrayal of the natural environments studied by Church. The presence of the cross suggests the peaceful coexistence of religion with the landscape.

Recent accounts of the painting have placed it within modern thematic discourses, such as the tension between art and science, and American territorial expansion. The split between the humanities and the scientific worldview was nascent in 1859: Charles Darwin's "On the Origin of Species" would be published later in the same year as Church's painting.

Exhibition

"The Heart of the Andes" was first exhibited publicly between April 29 and May 23, 1859 at New York's Studio Building on West 10th Street, the city's first "studio edifice" designed for artists. The event attracted an unprecedented turnout for a single-painting exhibition in the United States: more than 12,000 people paid an admission fee of twenty-five cents to view the painting. Even on the final day of the showing, patrons waited in line for hours to enter the Exhibition Room.cite journal|title="The Heart of the Andes" Exhibited: Frederic E. Church's Window on the Equatorial World | author=Avery, Kevin J. |journal=American Art Journal| volume=18 |issue=1|year=Winter, 1986|pages=52–72|doi=10.2307/1594457]

The installation of the work was as unique as its dimension and detail. There is no record of the appearance or arrangement of the Studio Building exhibit. It has been widely claimed, although probably falsely, that the room was decorated with palm fronds and that gaslights with silver reflectors were used to illuminate the painting. More certain is that the painting's casement-window–like "frame" had a breadth of fourteen feet and a height of almost thirteen, which further imposed the painting upon the viewer. It was likely made of brown chestnut, a departure from the prevailing gilt frame. The base of the edifice stood on the ground, ensuring that the landscape's horizon would be displayed at the viewer's eye level. Drawn curtains were fitted, creating the sense of a view out a window. A skylight directed at the canvas heightened the perception that the painting was illuminated from within, as did the dark fabrics draped on the studio walls to absorb light. Opera glasses were provided to patrons to allow examination of the landscape's details, and may have been necessary to satisfactorily view the painting at all, given the crowding in the exhibition room.

Church's canvas had a significant effect on its viewers: "women felt faint. Both men and women succumb [ed] to the dizzying combination of terror and vertigo that they recognize [d] as the sublime. Many of them will later describe a sensation of becoming immersed in, or absorbed by, this painting, whose dimensions, presentation, and subject matter speak of the divine power of nature."Poole, Deborah. "Landscape and the Imperial Subject: U.S. Images of the Andes, 1859–1930." "Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of U.S.-Latin American Relations." Duke University Press: 1998. ISBN 0822320991; pp. 107–138.]

Accompanying the admission were two pamphlets about the painting: Theodore Winthrop's "A Companion to The Heart of the Andes" and the Reverend Louis Legrand Noble's "Church's Picture, The Heart of the Andes". In the manner of travel guides, the booklets provided a tour of the painting's varied topography. An excerpt from Noble reads:

Church wanted Humboldt, his intellectual mentor, to see his masterpiece. Close to the end of the first exhibition, on May 9, 1859 he wrote of this desire to American poet Bayard Taylor:

Humboldt, however, had died on May 6, so the planned shipment to Europe did not occur. However, later in 1859, the painting was exhibited in London, where it met with similar popularity, and engravings allowed for broad distribution . Showings in six more U.S. cities followed. The 1864 exhibition at the Metropolitan Sanitary Fair at New York's Union Square is better documented than the original exhibit; photographs confirm how the painting was displayed.

The painting was widely acclaimed. Poetry was written in its honor, and the composer George William Warren dedicated a piece to it in 1863. Mark Twain described the painting to a friend:

Church eventually sold the work for $10,000—at that time the highest price ever paid for a work by a living American artist. The Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired the painting in 1909, and in 1993, held an exhibition that attempted to reproduce the conditions of the 1859 exhibit.

References