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Glorious Country : How the Artist Frederic Church Brought the World to America and America to the World
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- ISBN-13: 9781982196295
- ISBN-10: 1982196297
- Publisher: Scribner Book Company
- Publish Date: May 2026
- Dimensions: 9.34 x 6.29 x 1.23 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.54 pounds
- Page Count: 448
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It probably would have been easy to like Frederic Church in his prime in the 1850s and ’60s—but also to hate him just a little bit. The Hudson River School landscape painter was talented, popular with the public, rich (for an artist), good-looking in a lanky way and genuinely nice. Definitely enviable.
Good luck seldom lasts forever, and his later life was shadowed by grief and illness. His popularity also waned, at least with the artistic establishment. Church’s cultural eclipse lasted for a half-century after his death in 1900. But his spectacularly romantic depictions of volcanic mountains, waterfalls and skies from throughout the Americas are now admired again, and author Victoria Johnson takes a fresh look at his vigorous life and important legacy in Glorious Country: How the Artist Frederic Church Brought the World to America and America to the World.
Just in time for Church’s centennial (he was born into a prosperous Connecticut family in 1826), this biography is also perfectly timed with the nation’s semiquincentennial. As Johnson illustrates, Church’s art and personality epitomized the energy of mid-19th-century America. He was a compulsive traveler; some of his best work, like “Heart of the Andes,” stemmed from his dangerous journeys through wild regions of South America. Johnson, whose American Eden was a Pulitzer finalist, depicts Church as a sort of Indiana Jones with a painting kit, and she recreates his terrifying treks on high mountain trails in captivating detail.
Church had a natural eye for landscape detail, but he was also inspired by the scientific leaps of his time. “Church arrived at this powerful new language of painting because he didn’t accept clear distinctions among science, art, and religion,” Johnson writes. Church brought it all together in paintings like “Niagara,” “Cotopaxi” and “Iceberg.” The public loved them, and rich collectors bought them. But tastes change. The artistic up-and-comers from the 1880s on thought his work was “overly earnest,” Johnson writes; for his part, Church thought the Impressionists were just lazy.
His reputation was revived in the 1960s by a successful campaign to save his former home, the fabulous faux-Persian mansion called Olana, which he built on a Hudson Valley hilltop and filled with treasures from his travels. “Olana is a three-dimensional Church painting,” writes Johnson, “composed from the elements he worshipped all his life: earth, stone, plants, water, sky, and the transfixing, metamorphic play of light across them all.” It’s as much a work of art as his grand painting of Niagara Falls. One can imagine him standing atop it, gazing at the world with awe.
It probably would have been easy to like Frederic Church in his prime in the 1850s and ’60s—but also to hate him just a little bit. The Hudson River School landscape painter was talented, popular with the public, rich (for an artist), good-looking in a lanky way and genuinely nice. Definitely enviable.
Good luck seldom lasts forever, and his later life was shadowed by grief and illness. His popularity also waned, at least with the artistic establishment. Church’s cultural eclipse lasted for a half-century after his death in 1900. But his spectacularly romantic depictions of volcanic mountains, waterfalls and skies from throughout the Americas are now admired again, and author Victoria Johnson takes a fresh look at his vigorous life and important legacy in Glorious Country: How the Artist Frederic Church Brought the World to America and America to the World.
Just in time for Church’s centennial (he was born into a prosperous Connecticut family in 1826), this biography is also perfectly timed with the nation’s semiquincentennial. As Johnson illustrates, Church’s art and personality epitomized the energy of mid-19th-century America. He was a compulsive traveler; some of his best work, like “Heart of the Andes,” stemmed from his dangerous journeys through wild regions of South America. Johnson, whose American Eden was a Pulitzer finalist, depicts Church as a sort of Indiana Jones with a painting kit, and she recreates his terrifying treks on high mountain trails in captivating detail.
Church had a natural eye for landscape detail, but he was also inspired by the scientific leaps of his time. “Church arrived at this powerful new language of painting because he didn’t accept clear distinctions among science, art, and religion,” Johnson writes. Church brought it all together in paintings like “Niagara,” “Cotopaxi” and “Iceberg.” The public loved them, and rich collectors bought them. But tastes change. The artistic up-and-comers from the 1880s on thought his work was “overly earnest,” Johnson writes; for his part, Church thought the Impressionists were just lazy.
His reputation was revived in the 1960s by a successful campaign to save his former home, the fabulous faux-Persian mansion called Olana, which he built on a Hudson Valley hilltop and filled with treasures from his travels. “Olana is a three-dimensional Church painting,” writes Johnson, “composed from the elements he worshipped all his life: earth, stone, plants, water, sky, and the transfixing, metamorphic play of light across them all.” It’s as much a work of art as his grand painting of Niagara Falls. One can imagine him standing atop it, gazing at the world with awe.