THE ART OF ELEGY

The dusks and dawns of Frederic Church's Jamaican landscapes illuminate the nuances of grief in an exhibition at the artist's former home.

- James D. Balestrieri

In March of 1865, just as the devastations of the Civil War were about to come to a close and a scant month before President Abraham Lincoln would be assassinated, Frederic Church and his wife Isabel lost both of their children, two-year-old Herbert and five-month-old Emma, to diphtheria.

They packed up their grief and traveled to Jamaica where Church sketched and painted, while his wife collected and pressed ferns of the island.

Dusks and dawns from Church's easel, as he took in and transformed the Jamaican scenery, form the core of Afterglow: Frederic Church and the Landscape of Memory, an exhibition now on view at Church's home, the Olana State Historic Site in Hudson, New York. In addition to important paintings by Church and others, the exhibition features never-before-seen objects from the family that resonate with memorial energy.

By 1865, Frederic Church was already one of the nation’s most prominent painters. One of the founders of what would come to be called the Hudson River School, Church took over as elder statesman— of what was, in truth, a fairly loose association of artists-when his mentor.

Thomas Cole, passed away in 1858. Born into one of the founding families of Hartford, Connecticut, Church’s interest in art met encouragement from his family and he would subsequently become Cole’s only pupil. Inspired by the vision of explorer-scientist Alexander von Humboldt, who saw the universe as an interconnected web of natural, spiritual and aesthetic phenomena, as well as the philosophy of English critic John Ruskin, who advocated the close observation of nature as the artist’s first responsibility, Church traveled to South America. On his return to his New York studio, he created a sensation with singlework exhibitions of monumental, meticulously realistic paintings like Heart of the Andes.