Word: cotopaxi
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...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...
Turner had been to the Alps. Church would go to South America. He made, in fact, two trips, in 1853 and 1857, and discovered his great motif, the volcano of Cotopaxi. He painted it dozens of times, and in the end the effort of grappling with the utterly unfamiliar landscape of the Andes forced him to maturity as a painter. By 1866, when he set down the glittering double-arc rainbow that spans from bare mountain to jungle in Rainy Season in the Tropics, he had attained a rhetorical grandeur of painted space that...
There is not a made-up leaf or an ornithologically unidentifiable bird in Church's South American paintings; though they were all done back in his New York studio; every hair on the tiny llamas looks right. Yet those who thought Church's paintings of Cotopaxi were faithful to the primal scene of nature were wrong. They were more than faithful; they were, so to speak, ecstatic. Nobody could call the view of Cotopaxi dull, but when Church saw it in 1853, it completely lacked the palms, writhing creepers, streams and waterfalls he would later give it. "The big mountain...
...this enhanced their power for the 19th century viewer, who wanted epitomes of nature, filled with moral messages. These Church supplied in abundance. He never actually saw his volcano erupt -- it did so on Sept. 13, 1853, three days after he left the area -- but when he painted Cotopaxi in 1862 in full eruption, he could not have left much doubt that this scene also held a lesson for an America plunged into hatred and despair by the Civil War. The morning sun rises through the plume of smoke and ash, irresistibly, its disk made lurid but not extinguished...
...century European painting, except for J.M.W. Turner and John Martin, prepares us for the burst of patriarchal radiance that Ms Bierstadt's Sunset in the Yosemite Valley, 1868. The sun is hidden by a crag as though it were the unspeakable name of Yahweh. When Frederic Church painted Cotopaxi, 1862, he deliberately invoked the creation of the world-a panorama of sifting red light, boiling vapors, lakes emptying over the abyss, and a volcano in the background. Even when it was less convulsive than a Mexican volcano or the sliding lip of Niagara Falls, American nature could...