During the 19th century, the artists of a young America searched for a new way of viewing the world and found it in the very landscapes around them. Inspired by the stunning natural beauty of New York state, the loose-knit Hudson River School of painters flourished from the mid-1830s to the mid-1870s and gave America its first major school of art.
Frederic Edwin Church, born in Hartford, Connecticut, was the son of a wealthy man whose considerable assets provided the youth with the means to develop his early interest in art. By the age of sixteen, he was studying drawing and painting; two years later, Daniel Wadsworth, son-in-law of John Trumbull and, like Trumbull, a patron of Thomas Cole's, prevailed upon Cole to take Church as his pupil. Church's precociousness displayed itself quickly. Within a year, he had been shown in the National Academy of Design annual exhibition; the following year, he sold his first major oil, to Hartford's Wadsworth Atheneum.
The family wealth came from Church's father, Joseph Church, a ilversmith and watchmaker in Hartford, Connecticut (Joseph subsequently also became an official and a director of The Aetna Life Insurance Company). Joseph, in turn, was the son of Samuel Church, who founded the first paper mill in Lee, Massachusetts in the Berkshires, and this allowed him (Frederic) to pursue his interest in art from a very early age.
At one point, the master characterized the student as having "the finest eye for drawing in the world." Following his term with Cole, Church established a studio in New York City and quickly seized a reputation, less for the allegorical landscapes that had distinguished Cole's output, than for expansive New York and New England views that synthesized sketches of varying locales into vivid compositions. In 1857, however, Church leapt to nationwide and even international prominence with his seven-foot-wide picture Niagara (Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), which stunned spectators in New York and in Great Britain (where it was shown in 1857 and 1858) with its combination of breadth and uncanny verisimilitude.
