Frederic Church was a pupil of Thomas Cole, the great American landscape painter of the Hudson River School, (see the Art Card for Indian Pass, 1847). Cole once said that Church had the finest eye for drawing in the world, so Church did not study with Cole to learn technical skills. What Church did learn from Cole, however, was an understanding of Cole’s deeply held ideas about an artist’s responsibility not only to convey the physical beauty of the world, but also to address the complex and profound ideas about mankind and the human condition. Although Church became very successful painting landscapes in the New England area in the late 1840s and 1850s, he came from an enormously wealthy Connecticut family, and was never dependent on the income from his painting. After reading the German naturalist, Alexander von Humboldt’s (1769–1859) Cosmos, a large collection of writings about scientific ideas and discoveries, Church became fascinated with the Andes Mountains region of South America. Church first traveled there in 1853, and produced several widely acclaimed landscapes based on what he saw, including Cotopaxi. He continued to travel extensively, drawing and sketching scenery, throughout the remainder of his life.
Cotopaxi, the cone-shaped volcano in the Andes Mountains of Ecuador, can be seen in the distance in Church’s panoramic South American landscape. The snowcapped volcano rises approximately 10,000 feet from the valley floor to a summit of about 19,500 feet above sea level. It is surrounded by the warm tropics, filled with exotic plants and birds. A thundering waterfall sits in the distance, behind a calm, reflective lake. A subtle puff of smoke drifts from the volcano, hinting at Cotopaxi’s powerful potential for devastation, while the tiny figures in the foreground suggest the insignificance of humanity compared to the vastness of nature. Church spent six months travelling through the mountains and tropical forests of Colombia and Ecuador. Cotopaxi became the subject of many of his works for the next ten years.
During his travels Church made very extensive notes on what he observed. He was then able to use the notes in his work to draw details with incredible accuracy. In his painting, Cotopaxi, Church renders the objects in the foreground with great care and detail, whereas in the middle ground and background, the elements are drawn less precisely.
The generation of landscape painters that preceded Church, including Church’s teacher Thomas Cole, looked to the Hudson River Valley and other areas of the American east for inspirational subject matter with which to convey their moral messages. The next generation, of which Church was a part, looked beyond the American east to the American west, and even to South America. American Romantic landscape painting, such as Cotopaxi, was intended to evoke feelings of awe at the power of nature. The works often contained a moralistic message for the viewer, depicting the powerful forces of nature versus the small scale of man and human efforts. In an era before extensive travel and photography, these paintings also served as documentation of exotic and distant lands.
