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Object Timeline
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Drawing, Niagara from Goat Island, Winter
This is a Drawing. It was created by Frederic Edwin Church. It is dated March 1856 and we acquired it in 1917. Its medium is brush and oil paint, graphite on paperboard. It is a part of the Drawings, Prints, and Graphic Design department.
Alchemy In Situ
“The trip was … one of risk … no one is allowed to sketch alive there … an artist who ventured there was shot while attempting a sketch … I flung open my sketchbook and drew the scene roughly … we then dashed down the path and seized another view and so on sketching and running...”[1] Frederic Edwin Church thus describes snatching a sketch in Petra. The perils of plein-air painting have long been admired—a nineteenth-century version of the photo-journalist in the trenches. This oil sketch, probably a studio distillation of a scene painted outdoors on Goat Island, Niagara Falls, shows hasty hand- and brushwork, a feature of Church’s work less celebrated in his time than his more “finished” paintings. The latter were esteemed for their uniform surfaces: devoid of the artist’s mark, they purportedly revealed only “true,” “objective” nature. By contrast, his sketches reveal the artist’s initial impulse, his chosen focus, his process, and his thinking.
Viewing Church’s icy perch at Niagara’s edge reminds me of my own experiences painting outdoors in winter by frozen water, speedily brushing the sun’s cast colors onto canvas as they change before my eyes, my numbing hands producing decisive, unpredictable brush strokes. I can appreciate the gleeful challenge of capturing water, ice and mist in paint under duress.
In Church’s sketch the tower acts as an anchor against the rush of waves, ice, wind and air. Here, in this lull in the awe-inspiring onslaught of the Falls, diagonal streaks of orange-red move through the vapors, background and foreground collapsing in diagonal slashes.
Church and his friend and teacher Thomas Cole and others (collectively, “The Hudson River School”) isolated “pure” nature amidst a rising industrial American landscape. Omitting signs of modern life, they believed that in “pure” nature God’s presence unfolds. Adventuring to paint America’s natural wonders, the Hudson River painters enhanced the allure of increasingly touristic sites, resulting in commerce and industry that de-enhanced the very bucolic views the artists propagated.
The ephemeral quality of Church’s sketches is closer to modern taste than his “finished” paintings. An exhibit, Through American Eyes: Frederic Church and the Landscape Oil Sketch at the National Gallery in London February 6 - April 28, 2013 includes some Niagara sketches from the Cooper-Hewitt collection.
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[1] Frederic Edwin Church, Petra Diary, 1868, p.38-40, Olana Archives.
This object was featured in our Object of the Week series in a post titled Alchemy In Situ.
This object was
donated by
Louis P. Church.
It is credited Gift of Louis P. Church.
Its dimensions are
29.3 x 44 cm (11 9/16 x 17 5/16 in.)
It is signed
Signed in brush and red oil, lower left center: F. Church 56 / March.
Cite this object as
Drawing, Niagara from Goat Island, Winter; Frederic Edwin Church (American, 1826–1900); USA; brush and oil paint, graphite on paperboard; 29.3 x 44 cm (11 9/16 x 17 5/16 in.); Gift of Louis P. Church; 1917-4-765-a
This object was previously on display as a part of the exhibition Frederic Church, Winslow Homer & Thomas Moran: Tourism and the American Landscape.
