Heart of the Andes

For all their powerful visual drama, many of the iconic landscapes of the American painter Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900) are relatively small in size and were originally intended for private collections. But one of his greatest paintings is also one of his largest, the monumental "Heart of the Andes," currently on view in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Lehman Wing. Painted in 1859, this canvas (measuring more than 10 feet by 5 feet) embodies Church's large-scale vision of scenic majesty and his overriding belief that God was revealed in the wonders of nature.


Like other members of the Hudson River School, Church was influenced by the idea of the "sublime and picturesque" initially published by the 18th-century Anglo-Irish writer and statesman Edmund Burke. A 1756 Burke essay attempted to identify the differences between that which is beautiful and that which is sublime or great. Beautiful objects, wrote Burke, are "comparatively small," "smooth and polished," "light and delicate." Burke identified sublime or great objects as "vast in their dimensions . . . rugged and negligent"; "the great ought to be dark and gloomy . . . solid, and even massive."


Hudson River School painters ventured beyond the picturesque rolling scenery of the Catskills and New England in search of the sublime. Church set his sights toward South America. In this he was influenced not only by Burke, but by the German naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt, who had toured that continent extensively from 1799 to 1804. In 1807, Humboldt urged painters to "seize, with the first freshness of a pure youthful mind, the living image of manifold beauty and grandeur in the humid mountain valleys of the tropical world."


Church voyaged to South America in 1853 and 1857, exploring the rivers, lakes and mountains of Colombia and Ecuador, and making numerous sketches and studies. He turned them into finished works in his Manhattan studio. It was an artist's duty, he believed, to record details of topography and plant-life with scientific accuracy, but also to arrange those details imaginatively to achieve the most effective—indeed the most exalted—composition possible.


Church therefore painted "Heart of the Andes" not to reproduce a specific Andean view, but to create an ideal one. Onto the tradition of idealized, sometimes dreamlike landscapes of such 17th-century French masters as Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain, Church grafted the fruits of his meticulous studies—not only of mountains, plains, rivers and waterfalls, of every kind of tree and shrub, bird and beast he encountered, but of the atmospheric effects of clouds and skies in the region. Not to mention details of local architecture and costumes of the native folk, which he carefully included in his composition.

 

Our eyes travel from the top of the great canvas—the cloud-figured sky forming a deliberately "Olympian" meteorological backdrop—along the diagonal planes of the looming mountains. The snow-clad peaks in the extreme distance are seemingly born of the sky-blue tear in the cloud cover, the violet and purple shadows of the closer range represent Church's careful record of the region's geology. Near the center of the canvas, a broad, grassy plateau ends suddenly in an escarpment sheltering a forest and a village—replete with church tower—beside a river whose placid waters reflect the architecture. Closer still is the opalescent mist of the river's steplike waterfall, and to its left, a roadside shrine with its group of praying travelers. Equally clear is the superbly rendered tangle of vegetation and wildflowers in the lower-right corner of the picture, the various textures of ferns, foliage, bark and exposed roots in the copse of trees clinging to the eroded cliff just beyond.

For sheer technique, one of the painting's most telling passages is the juxtaposition of the leafy crown of the tallest birch tree in that copse, vividly painted with innumerable strokes of greens and browns, against the soft misted grays of the mountain peak beyond: Though we are looking at two thin layers of oil paint, the contrast of textures persuades our eyes to perceive immense distance between the two. And as the final touch, in the far-left foreground is Church's signature "carved" into the highlighted trunk of another tree.

Obviously this kind of Romantic-scientific thinking was not limited to painting at the time, and Church's contemporary, Walt Whitman, evokes a similar vision in these lines: "O sun of noon refulgent! / . . . Thou that impartially infoldest all, not only continents, seas, / Thou that to grapes and weeds and little wild flowers givest so liberally, / Shed, shed thyself on mine and me . . ."