Church now uses to make long trips during summer and to spend winter in painting landscapes in his studio for his customers. He early lost the mystical inspiration of Cole to be more appealed by the structure of the landscape.
Humboldt had discussed the special morphology of the Andean mountains considered as a challenge for the artists. Church travels in South America for the first time in 1853. In Quito, he lives in a house where Humboldt had stayed.
Influenced by the theories of the geographer, Church is even better perceiving the charm of the Appalachian Mountains, spectacular without reaching the extravagance of the Cordillera.
On May 19 in New York, Christie's sells an ideal landscape that may be located in Maine or Vermont, oil on canvas 76 x 107 cm painted in 1854, lot 39 estimated $ 3.5M. In the quiet light of a late afternoon, nature is hardly disturbed by a boat in obscurity and a few cows on the lakeshore.
Church is a pioneer of US landscape painting, anticipating the grandiose images of the Wild West by Bierstadt and Moran.
unsold