Word: andes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...J.M.W. Turner. When Church showed a single landscape, Americans would turn out to see it in the kind of droves that require the pull of a whole retrospective today. In 1859 he made $3,000 in three weeks -- at 25 cents a ticket -- by displaying Heart of the Andes, his enormous image of mountains, gorge, valley, river and jungle, in a studio on Tenth Street in New York City...
...previous American artist had touched both highbrow and middlebrow in this way, and few would manage to do so later. Church was an inventive showman. Heart of the Andes, more than 5 ft. by 9 ft., went on view in a trompe l'oeil architectural frame built, literally, like a picture window, so that one sat down on a bench and had the illusion of gazing from a Victorian living room into sublimity, complete with palms, parrots and Andean campesinos adoring a cross. If his other paintings prefigured CinemaScope, this one was the ancestor of the big-screen home...
...mock-up of this Pharaonic piece of now lost joinery, Heart of the Andes is at the National Gallery of Art in Washington through March 18, along with 48 other paintings by Church. Most of his single-image blockbusters are also there, including his series on Cotopaxi in Ecuador; The Icebergs, 1861; and the picture that made him the most famous artist in America and amazed even John Ruskin -- the stupendous view of Niagara Falls from the Canadian side, the green glass water sliding faster and faster toward the edge and into the clouds of white vapor...