Art: Heart of the Hudson

Little or nothing in our experience approximates the thoroughly American and thoroughly extinct nineteenth-century tradition of “Great Painting.” When our ancestors invoked this term, they meant something very specific. They referred to the exhibition of a single large canvas, usually a minutely detailed landscape suffused with moral sentiment, which the general public, inspired by Barnumesque hooplah, eagerly paid its hard-earned pennies to see.

The grandest of the Great Paintings of the nineteenth century was undoubtedly Frederic Edwin Church’s Heart of the Andes, an expansive vista of tropical scenery. It was first exhibited in New York’s Tenth Street Studio Building in 1859, the year of Darwin’s Origin of Species and Wagner’s Tristan. A photograph preserves for us the installation’s appearance. Separated from an adoring public by a wooden railing, the picture was almost overwhelmed by a massive, ornate oak frame whose topmost part was draped in cascading folds of shagged and tasseled vermilion velvet. Above, in a canopied cartouche, were portraits of our first three Presidents. Surrounded by imported palms in a dramatically darkened room, the painting could be seen only by gaslight. Some visitors strained their eyes to read pamphlets that pious churchmen had written about the painting, and that were being hawked in the gallery. Others gazed through opera-glasses and metal tubes and thought they were really in the Andes. For seven weeks a stream of visitors crowded into the cramped and overheated chamber, and by the end of it all, Church had become a wealthy man.

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James Gardner

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Little or nothing in our experience approximates the thoroughly American and thoroughly extinct nineteenth-century tradition of “Great Painting.” When our ancestors invoked this term, they meant something very specific. They referred to the exhibition of a single large canvas, usually a minutely detailed landscape suffused with moral sentiment, which the general public, inspired by Barnumesque hooplah, eagerly paid its hard-earned pennies to see.

The grandest of the Great Paintings of the nineteenth century was undoubtedly Frederic Edwin Church’s Heart of the Andes, an expansive vista of tropical scenery. It was first exhibited in New York’s Tenth Street Studio Building in 1859, the year of Darwin’s Origin of Species and Wagner’s Tristan. A photograph preserves for us the installation’s appearance. Separated from an adoring public by a wooden railing, the picture was almost overwhelmed by a massive, ornate oak frame whose topmost part was draped in cascading folds of shagged and tasseled vermilion velvet. Above, in a canopied cartouche, were portraits of our first three Presidents. Surrounded by imported palms in a dramatically darkened room, the painting could be seen only by gaslight. Some visitors strained their eyes to read pamphlets that pious churchmen had written about the painting, and that were being hawked in the gallery. Others gazed through opera-glasses and metal tubes and thought they were really in the Andes. For seven weeks a stream of visitors crowded into the cramped and overheated chamber, and by the end of it all, Church had become a wealthy man.