Galleries And Exhibitions!!!

The National Gallery!!!

Through American Eyes: Frederic Church and the Landscape Oil Sketch

Issued: November 2012

6 February – 28 April 2013

Room 1

Admission free

Majestic scenes and striking colouration dramatise the works on display in The National Gallery’s exhibition Through American Eyes: Frederic Church and the Landscape Oil Sketch. The spring exhibition explores the remarkably fresh and spontaneous oil sketches of Frederic Church (1826–1900), considered by many to be the greatest American exponent of the landscape oil sketch.

Church’s oil sketches reveal the freshness of his work and the spontaneity of his style as he captured scenes out of doors, some of which he elaborated later in the studio. Regarded as one of the most ambitious of the Hudson River School landscape painters, his works reveal his voracious appetite for travel to locations as distant as Ecuador, 'Distant View of the Sangay Volcano, Ecuador' (1857); Jordan, 'Ed Deir, Petra' (1868); Jamaica, 'Ridges in the Blue Mountains, Jamaica' (1865); Germany, 'Königssee, Bavaria' (1868); and the waters off Labrador where he studied icebergs.

The exhibition also includes works executed closer to Church’s home on the Hudson in Upstate New York including 'Winter Twilight from Olana' (about 1871-2) and 'Hudson, New York at Sunset' (1867) which reflect his interest in the American landscape and his exploration of the effect of light.

Frederic Church Painter.

Step into a world of wild natural phenomena with the landscape oil sketches of celebrated American landscape painter, Frederic Church.

‘Through American Eyes: Frederic Church and the Landscape Oil Sketch’ displays a distinctive aspect of the work of Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900), his landscape oil sketches.

Church was a leading member of the Hudson River School of landscape painters, active in the mid-19th century, and a key American exponent of the oil sketch which he executed both at home and on his extensive travels to Niagara Falls, Labrador, Jamaica, Mexico and the Middle East.

Oil sketches have become objects of appreciation and study in their own right. Among students of American art, Church’s sketches in particular are admired for their freshness and originality.

This exhibition brings together around 25 oil sketches. Works are drawn from the incomparable collections of the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, New York, and Olana, Church’s picturesque estate along the Hudson River, now a New York State Historic Site.

They are joined in the exhibition by a single, monumental painting, 'Niagara Falls, from the American Side' (1867), showing the relationship between sketch and finished masterpiece.

The exhibition will travel to the Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh (11 May – 8 September 2013).

This exhibition is organised by the National Gallery in partnership with and through major support from the Terra Foundation for American Art. Additional support comes from The Olana Partnership and generous loans from Olana and Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution.

The National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, London WC2N 5DN

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