![]() ![]() The painting of the Sun is noticeably built up in oils of white and yellow, in contrast to the smoothness of the other areas. (This would not be the case in The Heart of the Andes, which is given over to detail.) The sunlight casts the whole image in its radiance, making the distant mountains faint and creating shadows on the small foreground details like the grazing llamas. Although the painting is highly detailed throughout, the strong light of the Sun subordinates these details, providing the overall effect that Cole espoused. Cole believed that details should be limited in the search for a general, sublime effect. The Andes of Ecuador retains some of the influence of Church's teacher, Thomas Cole. ![]() In the 1859 painting, Church more clearly cataloged the diversity of plants and topography, culminating in Chimborazo, and used a more naturalistic lighting. ) It excluded Chimborazo, the Ecuadorian mountain then thought to be the world's highest. (A contemporary critic in Harper's Weekly commented that "all detail, all shape lost in the vastness of the gorges". The Andes of Ecuador depicted little tropical flora and its details were subdued by the strong light. In 1859, after his second trip south, Church painted his monumental The Heart of the Andes, another composite of South American landscapes and a re-interpretation of Humboldt's aesthetic ideas. Humboldt encouraged painters to make sketches in the field, a practice not then common, and this painting shows the influence of Church's sketches in northern Ecuador and southern Colombia. The plateau is a strong horizontal line just beneath that point. Thus the mountains in The Andes of Ecuador-probably Tungurahua at left and Cotopaxi at right -are arranged along two lines that would converge near the painting's center. Around the Chota Valley, Humboldt marvelled at the Andes' "symmetrical disposition in two lines from north to south", and noted that a plateau rather than a valley separated them. Church's approach to landscape painting was influenced by Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, who wrote of his travels in South America and exhorted painters to capture the beauty of the New World. The painting is a composite image of different climate zones, from snowy mountains in the distance to grasslands in the mid-ground and tropical flora in the foreground. It is Church's first major painting, his largest work to date, and "an early masterpiece of Luminism", according to the Reynolda House Museum of American Art in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, which holds the painting. It is the most significant result of his 1853 trip to South America, where he would travel again in 1857. The Andes of Ecuador is an 1855 oil painting by Frederic Edwin Church, the premier American landscape painter of the time. Reynolda House Museum of American Art, Winston-Salem, North Carolina Painting by Frederic Edwin Church The Andes of Ecuador ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |