Brush stroke explorations: American-born Frederic Edwin Church, whose grand canvases were created with precise accuracy and sublime form, exemplified landscape paintings during an age of discovery.

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In an age when a photograph taken with a cell phone can instantly beam across the globe, it may be hard to imagine an unseen, yet to be discovered world, or to appreciate how a young, scientifically-minded American artist, Frederic Edwin Church, could reveal the grandeur of the nineteenth century Western hemisphere to a curious world.

As California-bound gold rushers bypassed South America in clipper ships and America's Civil War pitted brother against brother, Frederic Church was fast becoming America's most influential and financially successful landscape painter. His billboard sized paintings were each presented as a single work of art at greatly anticipated events. They were shown by ticketed admission in dramatically set, gas lit rooms; draped with black crepe theatrical curtains and surrounded by exotic plants; and presented in ornate frames that resembled the windows of a grand mansion revealing breathtaking vistas rendered with almost photographic precision. Church amazed America and the British Isles with spectacles of erupting volcanoes; thundering waterfalls; tropical rain forests illuminated by complete double rainbows; and the Aurora Borealis above towering icebergs. These formidable works of art gave his audience views of places they would otherwise never have been able to see in their lifetime.

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Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900), a direct descendant of Hartford, Connecticut founder Richard Church, was a fifth generation American and the son of a silversmith/jeweler/insurance adjuster, who hoped his son would enter the business world. But what energetic young man of vision wanted to sit behind a desk during an age of discovery?

Frederic Church's vision was shaped by the exciting discoveries and explorations of his day. He was sixteen years old when America's Exploratory Expedition, led by Charles Wilkes, returned from four years of circumnavigating the world; mapping Antarctica and the Pacific Northwest; and descending into Hawaii's volcanoes. The expedition's artist, Titian Peale, the son of a famous painter and Philadelphia museum founder, had an accurate eye and was also an expert marksman. In addition to his sketches, he brought back 2,150 birds, 134 mammals, and 588 species of fish in the largest collection ever obtained from an expedition.

In his book about the Exploratory Expedition, Seas of Glory, historian Nathaniel Philbrick wrote, "A trip to the Pacific was equivalent to a modern day trip to the moon; voyages of discovery offered scientists a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to investigate exotic habitats--rain forests, volcanoes, tropical lagoons, icebergs, and deserts--bringing back specimens.... In an era before photography, artists were a crucial part of any expedition, providing drawings and paintings that were later used to create illustrations for the published scientific reports and the narrative." The historic four-year voyage yielded a stupefying amount of data. American historian William Goetzman explained, "The results of the expedition were larger and more complex than anyone could have imagined, and they outran the intellectual resources of the country."

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The Exploratory Expedition, with more than twenty scientists aboard a flotilla university, heralded science as an honorable career. Historian William Stanton observed: "By putting science into government and government into science, [Wilkes] made it possible for the American scientist to live by his profession like other respectable people."

Frederic Church's youth continued to be marked by new explorations, events, and discoveries in the world. When Church was eighteen, the explorer and cartographer John Charles Fremont crossed the Sierras opening a way to the West. That was also the year that the Mexican-American war began. When Church was nineteen, Sir John Franklin and his ships disappeared trying to find a Northwest Passage. It was precisely in this context of western expansion and adventure that Frederic Church began to study art.

Church was the first student to study with Hudson River artist Thomas Cole, the great moralist painter known for epic multi-canvas works, The Course of Empire and The Voyage of Life. By the time Church completed his two years apprenticeship with Cole, he had surpassed his teacher. Cole himself said that Church brought the "finest eye for drawing in the world." Church became ah associate member of the National Academy of Design at 22 and a full member at 23.

When Cole died in 1848, Church stepped out of his shadow, already a famous well-paid artist. (New England Scenery sold for a record price of US$ 1,300, causing art auction bidders to burst into spontaneous applause.) Church paid homage to his late teacher with a large canvas of a view of Cole's Catskill Mountain home above the Hudson River. Eventually, Church would return to the same area where he sketched with Cole and built his dream house, Olana.

Meanwhile, in 1849, the discovery of gold in California eclipsed all other discoveries, spurring a headlong rush westward for personal wealth. Bur while the "Forty-niners" hurried west, Church looked to South America, seeking to mine atmospheric gold and to work on the melding of science, art, and discovery.

Church followed the footsteps of Berlin-born geologist, Baron Alexander Von Humboldt. The Baron, whose circle of friends included Thomas Jefferson, Goethe, Schiller, and Simon Bolivar, had described his 1799 expedition in a four volume work, Kosmos, which attempted, like string theory today, to show an organic and inspiring wholeness to earth's most powerful forces. "Nature is a unity in diversity of phenomena," said Humboldt, "a harmony, blending together all created things, however dissimilar in form and attributes, one great whole animated by the breath of life."

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Humboldt devoted one chapter of his work to the role of the landscape painter. "Heroic landscape painting," he charged, "must be a result at once of a deep and comprehensive reception of external nature and of an inward process of the mind." These words were perhaps on Church's mind as he left for Colombia and Ecuador on two journeys, one in 1853 and another in 1857. And it was Humboldt's mastery of astronomy, natural phenomena, electricity, geology, magnetism, chemistry, botany, ethnology, history, geography, hydrography, mathematics, metallurgy, and poetry that led Church to render in exquisite detail the volcanic eruptions and immense waterfalls that Humboldt had described. Church was linking together the outward and inward worlds in scientifically precise landscapes.

Church's Niagara, "The falls with the roar left out," impressed New Yorkers, who lined up around the block to troop past the painting. Becoming his own publicist and stage manager, he was also extremely successful in attracting attention to his next work, The Heart of the Andes. At 25 cents a head, the initial showing in New York earned US$3,000, and triple that amount was made on subscriptions for the chromolithograph, which became a popular wedding gift in its day. Samuel Clemens came to see this painting three rimes, and Washington Irving, Church's Hudson River neighbor, also came to see it by special invitation.

Henry Tuckerman extolled "the grand effect of light" of The Heart of the Andes. "It literally floods the canvas with celestial fire and beams with glory like a sublime psalm of light." In fact, meteorology, a new science, would be Church's lifelong study. As Church's attorney friend Theodore Winthrop wrote, "A great work of art is a delight and a lesson."

The public enjoyed being transported to new worlds that it would never see in person. For a decade it was treated to a series of grand canvases, shown as "Great Pictures," solo exhibits in reverential settings. Church alternated northern spectacles with South American ones, leafy subjects with towers of ice. Dr. Issac Hayes, who journeyed toward the North Pole in July 1860 in the exploratory vessel, the SS United States, was one of Church's drawing students. At the northernmost point of his travels, Hayes named a mountain after Church. Returning the compliment, Church incorporated a sketch of icebergs sent by Hayes into a painting of an Aurora Borealis that Church had observed from Mount Desert Island in Maine.

Church's vista of Cayambe, painted on commission for Robert L. Stuart, another Humboldt fan, studies the contrast of an equatorial world's lush vegetation sweeping back to frozen mountains. It places the sun and moon in the same painting, combining all the elements: earth, water, air, and fire.

During those years, American artists were closely watching the works of British artists like Joseph Turner and John Ruskin. It took time, however, for Britain to return the favor and recognize artists like Church. The "colonies" were simply not considered a place likely to produce great art. In fact, one British critic who saw Niagara in New York asked, "When did he come over?" assuming that Church must have been British.

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Initially, Ruskin had harsh criticism for Church's Tequendama Falls near Bogota. Later, however, when the European tour of The Heart of the Andes reached London, Church achieved his due recognition and won Ruskin's respect. British painter Clarkson Stanfield acknowledged that recognition saying, "on this American, more than on any other ... does the mantle of our greatest painter [i.e. Turner], appear to have fallen."

Harvard's late geologist, Stephen Jay Gould, admitted to being "powerfully intrigued, (stunned would not be too strong a word)" by Church's success at combining the "power of human imagination in its fruitful union with accuracy." "Church," wrote Gould, "was respected as the most scientific of painters [whose] penchant for accuracy ... both for intricate botanical details in his foregrounds and geological forms in his backgrounds, was admired as a primary source of quality in his art and as a key to his success in awakening feelings of awe and sublimity in his viewers."

Gould pointed out a perfect storm of philosophical revolution in the convergence of three events: the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, Church's The Heart of the Andes tour in the British Isles, and the death of Alexander Von Humboldt in 1959. (Humboldt died before Church could ship The Heart of the Andes to Berlin in visual homage.) It was all part of a seismic shift in scientific thought. Darwin, too, was a Humboldt fan and trod in his footsteps in the Andes. In his diary entry of January 16, 1832, Darwin declared, "It has been for me a glorious day, like giving to a blind man eyes; he is overwhelmed by what he sees and cannot justly comprehend it. Such are my feelings and such may they remain."

Where Church found the sublime, Darwin also found groundbreaking science that shook people's religious sensibilities with its theories of evolution and survival of the fittest. Gould pondered the reason why Church's output waned after the publication of On the Origin of Species and noted the absence of Darwin's works in Church's personal library. "Still I wonder if the collapse of his vision of nature, wrought by Darwin's revolution, made it impossible ever to paint such landscapes again. If an uplifting harmony turns into a scene of bloody battle, is not the joke too bitter to bear?"

Church's life had also turned toward domestic pleasures. Glimpsing Isabel Mortimer Carnes, daughter of an American ambassador to Paris, through the draperies during the first showing of The Heart of the Andes in 1859, the artist introduced himself. On January 19, 1860, the Boston Evening Transcript reported that "Church has been successfully occupied with another Heart than that of the Andes." Making their home in the Catskills, Church purchased the first half of his 250 acre estate. The Highlands were added in 1867.

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Two paintings, The Sunrise and The Moonrise commemorated the birth of their first two children, Herbert and Emma, who died of diphtheria within weeks of each other in 1865, casting both parents into despairing grief.

Their friend Joseph B. Austin, who made his fortune mining Venezuelan gold, suggested meeting in Jamaica. There, Isabel threw the passion of her grief into fern collecting, and Frederic stormed the Blue Mountains capturing the stunning rainstorms over the sea and the drama of crepuscular rays in crimson sunsets. The trip sparked a flurry of paintings of botanical subjects that informed his tropical works for the rest of his life.

Those familiar with vistas from Jamaica's ancient volcanic Blue Mountains would readily believe Church's assertion: "Believe it or not, I saw this, and I was changed by this: and I was changed by the sighting." The powerful small oil sketch was transformed into The After Glow, and into the completion of Rainy Season in the Tropics, where the double rainbow commemorated the excruciating loss of his two children.

In Jamaica, Church's intense botanical studies, the most numerous of his career, and strenuous hikes into the mountains to paint and study tree ferns, provided a "change of scene, air, and life." "Mrs. Church is insane on the fern question," Church wrote to Theodore Cole on July 25, 1865. But with 550 species of ferns in Jamaica, it was as good a subject as any to become mad about, and Church himself did many delicate tree fem studies, several of which made their way onto major canvasses. Boxes and albums of hundreds of pressed ferns and live specimens, including whole tree-ferns, came back with them. "We have ferns of all sizes from hall an inch to eight feet in length," Church wrote. Hundreds of specimens remain unaccessioned at Olana. Church's work as a botanist might still provide important botanical clues for the preservation of Jamaica's "Fern Gully" in St. Ann's parish. The preservation was attempted at great expense by Jamaica's former Prime Minister, Edward Seaga, in the 1980s.

When his painting arm was crippled by rheumatoid arthritis and the work and fame of other artists and styles overtook his own, Church turned his energy to his 250 acre Hudson River estate which became a sculptural achievement of landscape architecture. His estate has been preserved and enjoyed for more than a century past his death. It is crowned by Olana, a Persian inspired treasure house that captures the essence of a gilded age.

Heidi Reidell, a US journalist, spends summers directing the Eastport School of Arts in Maine and winters in Malvern, St. Elizabeth, Jamaica.