Volume 53, Number 5 · March 23, 2006
Love of Fact
By John Updike
Treasures from Olana: Landscapes by Frederic Edwin Church
Catalog of the exhibit by Kevin J. Avery, with anintroduction by John Wilmerding
an exhibition at the National Academy Museum, New York City, February 9–April 30, 2006.
The Olana Partnership/Cornell University Press, 71 pp., $24.95
Eighteen oil paintings displayed in two wood-paneled and parquet-floored rooms on the second floor of the National Academy Museum on Fifth Avenue show Frederic Edwin Church, the most successful and ostentatiously skillful of mid-nineteenth-century American landscapists, to have been, when he let himself go in his quick on-site oil sketches, a dashing wielder of the brush. Speed of execution let air into his art. A large showpiece like The Heart of the Andes (1859), which thousands in New York and London paid admission money to see, has come to have the creepy feel of a huge piece of nature immobilized under glass. Church himself must have felt the superior liveliness of his preliminary oil studies, for he framed them and kept them in Olana, the Arabian Nights dream-home he built for himself and his family in the early 1870s, on a hilltop in view of the Hudson, on 250 acres he had begun to buy before the Civil War.
Review, 2903 words
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