Frederic Edwin Church was an American landscape painter, born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1826, who died in New York in 1900.
A pupil of Thomas Cole and a leading painter of the Hudson River School, he traveled to South America and the far north to paint huge views of nature, then sold tickets to see them. He is remembered for Niagara, The Heart of the Andes, The Icebergs and Olana, his house above the Hudson.
In the spring of 1859, New Yorkers paid 25 cents to stand in a darkened room in front of a single painting. It hung in a deep frame like a window, lit by gas, and many visitors brought opera glasses to pick out the leaves and the waterfalls. About 12,000 people came in three weeks.
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The Heart of the Andes made Church the most famous painter in America. His next great picture, of icebergs, went the other way. He first showed it in New York in April 1861, under the title The North, twelve days after the Civil War began, and promised the money from the opening to the families of Union soldiers. Nobody bought it.
So Church sent it to London, added a broken ship's mast in the foreground, gave it back its old name, The Icebergs, and sold it in 1863 to a railway man who hung it in his country house near Manchester. After that buyer died in 1901, the trail went cold, and for about three quarters of a century no one in the art world knew where the canvas was.
When it came back, the people who found it were not looking for a masterpiece. They were looking for money for a boys' home. The rest of that story begins in the stairwell of the country house, and it comes below.
What You'll Discover
Who taught him to see.
Who sent him to the Andes.
What 25 cents bought in 1857.
What a small cross is doing there.
Where a lost masterpiece was found.
What he built when painting hurt.