Like other landscape artists of the Hudson River School, Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900) painted wild scenes of the new land: an American wilderness that most people had never seen for themselves. Church worked with such attention to detail that his paintings mesmerized the society of his day.
A photographic portrait of Frederic Edwin Church, 1826, by Brady-Handy. Library of Congress. (Public Domain)
He suggested how light could leap and swirl around great natural landscapes. This was shown to great effect in the paintings Church did of Niagara Falls. He visited the falls often, inspired by its pounding water tripping over a rocky ledge in a steep fall to a plunge pool below….