art history

“Precisely These Objects”: Frederic Church and the Culture of Detail

Author(s): Jennifer Raab

Source: The Art Bulletin, Vol. 95, No. 4 (December 2013), pp. 578-596

Published by: College Art Association

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/43188855

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“Precisely These Objects”: Frederic Church and the
Culture of Detail

Jennifer Raab

“Why do precisely these objects which we behold make a
world?” Henry David Thoreau asks in Waiden while observing
the landscape around his cabin in the woods.1 The attempt to
reconcile part and whole, the visible and the vast, is also the
key issue for Thoreau’ s contemporary, the landscape painter
Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900). Both men struggled to
integrate science and belief, the minutiae of observable na-
ture and the immensity of God’s nature. In August 1851,
three years before the publication of Waiden , Thoreau wrote
in his journal, “I fear that the character of my knowledge is
from year to year becoming more distinct & scientific – That
in exchange for views as wide as heaven’s cope I am being
narrowed down to the field of the microscope – I see details
not wholes nor the shadow of the whole. I count some parts,
& say ‘I know.’ “2 Church’s works reveal the difficulty, or even
impossibility, of both seeing “precisely these objects” and
saying “I know.”

Nineteenth-century viewers expected landscape paintings
to balance precision and generality, detail and effect, but
Church’s pictures often seemed to upset this balance, espe-
cially as his career progressed. While an early painting like
The Andes of Ecuador (Fig. 1) encompasses its details under the
sun’s celestial light, The Heart of the Andes (Fig. 4) dizzies with
a proliferation of botanical specimens, and The Icebergs (Fig.
12) seems to withhold narrative signs. Such canvases elicited
celebratory, as well as conflicted, responses at midcentury.
Did Church’s scientific proclivities, his “avidity to gather new
and strange facts,”3 disrupt his ability to offer a broader,
allegorical message? “Study the foreground of a Church,” one
critic wrote, reflecting on the artist’s career shortly after his
death in 1900, “and you will find a constant struggle between
the desire to say everything and to say also the large and
appealing thing.”4 Such a struggle – in Church’s paintings
and also in critical responses to them – raises questions about
the function of detail in a work of art and its particularly
contested status during the second half of the nineteenth
century.

Church’s paintings visualize and historicize a fundamental
shift in representation during this period. This is a shift from
knowledge to information, from the assumption that all de-
tails could be contained in one great system to a realization
that details might delineate difference and even undermine
order. Whereas earlier in the nineteenth century the term
“knowledge” implied the pursuit of a unifying structure, “in-
formation” – a word more commonly used as the century
progressed – made no such promises.5 A system of represen-
tation based on universal knowledge became marked instead
by a discontinuity of information. Like Thoreau’s writing,
Church’s landscapes are poised between these paradigms.
While embracing the microscopic, both painter and writer
find that such details do not necessarily “make a world.”
Church’s landscapes compellingly represent the problems

and possibilities of seeing and knowing in a culture of
detail.6

Church’s works have most often been interpreted in terms
of national identity; my aim is instead to emphasize the visual
and epistemological rather than the political or ideological.7
Such an approach emerges from a fundamental question:
Why are these paintings so detailed? And thus: What might
that mean in the nineteenth century? As Albert Ten Eyck
Gardner writes about The Heart of the Andes in one of the first
modern réévaluations of Church: “An examination of the

painting today leads one to muse upon the possibility that
there was something behind its popularity which is now com-
pletely lacking.”8 Church’s paintings were enormously popu-
lar at midcentury, generating voluminous responses that,
though tending toward praise, also included compelling ac-
counts of confusion, ambivalence, and even passionate frus-
tration. To look closely at these pictures is to ask what history
may have erased or diminished.

For Church’s audience, the conventions of landscape
painting were intimately bound up with the role of detail.9
Smaller elements should move the eye and mind toward a
larger effect. In allegorical terms, nature’s details revealed
God’s greatness. Even if explicit symbols were absent, most
critics and viewers expected landscape painting to provoke
higher associations. The seventeenth-century canvases of
Claude Lorrain still provided the basis for conceptualizing
and critiquing a landscape composition: a tripartite structure
consisting of a darkened but detailed foreground; a strongly
lit middle distance; and a background of warm, inviting light.
Trees in the foreground, or another type of repoussoir object,
frame the scene and push the eye into deeper space. Such a
visual course had a conceptual correspondence: the small
and specific aspects of nature or narrative – those details that
the eye is drawn to first – should yield to a greater wholeness
inherent in the natural world and reflective of the divine.

Church’s details, by contrast, often seemed to emerge from
“the field of the microscope” and the world of things. Such
material specificity brought the artist his fame, but it also
produced the anxiety that Thoreau described. G. W. Shel-
don, the author of American Painters , lamented that Church’s

pictures neglected “the higher and spiritual verities of Na-
ture” that had traditionally defined landscape painting. Al-
though the artist’s works were all “well known” and “exceed-
ingly popular,” Sheldon pointed to the elaboration of detail
as their clear fault: “it is scarcely necessary to stop here and
explain what their principal defect is, because, by this time,
that defect must have been recognized by almost every intel-
ligent American lover of art. It consists in the elaboration of
details at the expense of the unity and force of sentiment.”
Writing in 1881, Sheldon assumes that his readers, “by this
time,” already understand this.10 Earlier reviewers more often
marveled at Church’s elaborate canvases, although some crit-

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FREDERIC CHURCH AND THE CULTURE OF DETAIL 579

1 Frederic Edwin Church, The Andes of Ecuador, 1855, oil on canvas, 48 X 76V£ in. (121.9 X 194.3 cm). Reynolda House Museum
of American Art, Winston-Salem, N.C., Original Purchase Fund from Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation, Z. Smith Reynolds
Foundation, ARCA Foundation, and Anne Cannon Forsyth (artwork in the public domain; photograph provided by Reynolda
House Museum of American Art)

icized the artist on such terms. The painter had a habit of
“crushing himself beneath his subject,” one wrote in 1863.
“He has, that is to say, often sacrificed general effect to a
multiplicity and elaboration of detail.”11 Donald Kuspit, writ-
ing in 1976, called Church a “highly ambiguous vision-
ary … a visionary of matter.”12 That “desire to say everything”
gave Church’s paintings a perceived weight and volume. The
optical closeness that the works provide complicated, or even
denied, those “views as wide as heaven’s cope.”

If the representation of the natural world became too
particular to yield to generalities, then the very assumptions
about the genre – about how a landscape painting should
look and how it should be interpreted – had to be reconsid-
ered. In other words, if harmony was not the end result, what
was? What if details did not add up to that “large and appeal-
ing thing”? How much detail was too much? And how much
was not enough? I want to take detail seriously – as a key
component of Church’s visual language, as a defining aspect
of nineteenth-century American culture, and as a concept
fundamental to the practice of art history.

Synthesis and Suppression
At twenty-two, Frederic Church became one of the youngest
artists ever elected as a full member of the prestigious Na-
tional Academy of Design. Instead of sending his major can-
vases – works like Niagara (1857; Corcoran Gallery of Art,

Washington, D.C.), The Heart of the Andes, and The Icebergs – to
the academy’s annual exhibition, he chose to display them
alone, for an admission fee, attracting tens of thousands of
viewers as these “Great Pictures” toured the United States and

crossed the Adan tic. 13 Newspapers speculated on the paint-
er’s studio production, reported on his wide-ranging travels,
and reviewed his exhibitions. Frederic Church, as one art

historian has argued, was “the nation’s first artistic celeb-
-, »14

nty.

The painter’s earliest and arguably most formative trip
took him not to Europe but to South America. In 1853, when
he was twenty-seven, Church traveled through Ecuador and
Colombia, returning in 1857 for another trek through the
Andean range.15 As Charles Darwin had done before him,
Church was following the path of the great German naturalist
Alexander von Humboldt, who had spent five years exploring
South America from 1799 to 1804. Church owned all of the

scientist’s important books, including all five volumes of Cos-
mos, and much of the artist’s library – which remains intact at
his home, Olana, in Hudson, New York – is made up of key
scientific texts of the time, including those that attempt to
reconcile the scientific and the divine.16

Humboldt had a broad audience in the United States, and

he specifically addressed landscape painters, encouraging
them to travel to the tropics and directly observe nature to
enrich their art.17 By looking past Europe’s familiar terrain to

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580 ART BULLETIN DECEMBER 2013 VOLUME XCV NUMBER 4

2 Church, The Andes of Ecuador , detail showing the sun
(artwork in the public domain; photograph provided by
Reynolda House Museum of American Art)

3 Church, The Andes of Ecuador ; detail showing tropical foliage
(artwork in the public domain; photograph provided by
Reynolda House Museum of American Art)

the tropics, landscape painters could “seize … on the true
image of the varied forms of nature.” Nature, Humboldt
argued, was “a unity in diversity of phenomena; a harmony,
blending together all created things, however dissimilar in
form and attributes.”18 Such harmony, however, was predi-
cated on “the suppression of all unnecessary detail.” Only
then could reason “grasp all that might otherwise escape the
limited range of the senses.”19 Unnecessary detail threatened
to cause confusion by pulling the viewer away from the pri-
mary narrative. Details and differences must ultimately be
absorbed into a greater whole. Cosmos , as the tide implies, was
based on humanistic unity.

The Andes of Ecuador , Church’s first major picture, best
visualizes Humboldt’s words. The painting provides a multi-
tude of foreground details but emphasizes effect, that “blend-
ing together [of] all created things.” Golden light pervades
the painting. The sun’s white orb is placed in the top center
of the canvas, a pupil-like form that appears at eye level (Fig.
2). The picture’s elevated perspective allows the viewer to see
the expanse of climate zones below: from palm trees to
grasslands to snow-clad peaks. For Church, who was a reli-
gious man, such wholeness had an inherently spiritual
connotation, and critics at the time interpreted the painting
this way. “It literally floods the canvas with celestial fire,”
one wrote, “and beams with glory like a sublime psalm of
light.”20 This light forms a cruciform shape, extending hori-
zontally across the sky and vertically down the center of the
canvas.

The painting conforms to the Romantic notion of the
sublime: nature as both awe-inspiring and overwhelming,
imaginable but too vast to fully comprehend.21 Thomas Cole,
Church’s mentor, felt that a painter must first forget those
details that he had seen in nature before he could begin to
paint a landscape. Time must “draw a veil over the common
details, the unessential parts, which shall leave the great
features, whether the beautiful or the sublime, dominant in

the mind.”22 As in Humboldt’s version of nature, suppression
allows for synthesis, the whole is only graspable through “a
generalization of particular facts.”23 In The Andes of Ecuador ,
the particular facts of the tropics (Fig. 3) – palm fronds and

clusters of red blossoms and jagged boulders and grazing
animals – are all present, but they are subordinated to the
sunlight that demands our primary attention. Church’s light
“veils” the foreground details, consumes the broad swath of
sky, and nearly obliterates the mountain peaks in the center
of the canvas. Science is still subject to the sublime.24

Darwin’s Details

If The Andes of Ecuador is Humboldt’s painting, The Heart of the
Andes (Fig. 4) is Darwin’s. Whereas the 1855 picture presents
a cohesive, cosmological narrative, the larger 1859 canvas
constantly tests the limits of symbolic order. The Heart of the
Andes is a landscape of expansive optical competition. Yet
Church undoubtedly intended quite the opposite effect. It
was supposed to be a stunning homage to Humboldt, a
catalog of botanical and geological and meteorological won-
ders, all part of one great cosmos. Church had hoped to ship
the massive canvas to Germany so that the eighty-nine-year-
old Humboldt could see it, but the scientist died just before
these plans could become a reality, and The Heart of the Andes
never went to Berlin.25 That same year The Origin of Species was

published. Humboldt’s concept of nature – what he called
“one great whole animated by the breath of life”26 – would
come to seem like a beautiful, but impossible, vision.

The Heart of the Andes displays an exuberance that flirts with
disorder. This is exactly what one feels when reading Darwin.
Each plant or mammal or mollusk is meticulously described,
the result of countless hours of observation and study. The
scientist might discuss a flying lemur on one page and a
Swedish turnip on another. At one point, “the teeth and
talons of the tiger,” the “plumed seed of the dandelion,” and
“the flattened and fringed legs of the water-beetle” all appear
in two sentences.27 The text is both precise and wide-ranging.
But such a broad scope does not translate into an easily
apprehensible unity. About natural selection, Darwin wrote:
“I can see no limit to the amount of change, to the beauty and
infinite complexity of the co-adaptations between all organic
beings.”28 This was the anxiety for Darwin’s audience: not the
existence of such complexity and contingency, but the fact
that harmony was not the result. Here was a world driven by

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FREDERIC CHURCH AND THE CULTURE OF DETAIL 5gļ

4 Church, The Heart of the Andes, 1859, oil on canvas, 66V6 X 119V4 in. (168 X 302.9 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New
York, Bequest of Margaret E. Dows, 1909, 09.95 (artwork in the public domain; photograph © The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
provided by Art Resource, NY)

adaptations at the smallest level of life rather than by an
inherent impetus toward wholeness.

Humboldt’s cosmology was based on nature’s infinite vari-
ety. This was the point of departure for both Darwin and
Church: an observational practice that privileged detail and a
mode of representation, on the page and on the canvas, that
evoked a sense of the staggering abundance of life. The
effect, though, was quite different: not a cosmos that could be
definitively mapped and known but a system constantly in
flux. Darwin’s theory, wrote Thoreau in his journal one day
in 1860, “implies a greater vital force in nature because it is
more flexible and accommodating, and equivalent to a sort
of constant new creation.”29 Such “constant new creation,” as

exhilarating as it is unpredictable, is apparent on every page
of Darwin’s book and on every inch of Church’s canvas. Each
is also founded on a certain kind of struggle, a struggle for
survival in Darwin’s theory of evolution, and a struggle for
attention in Church’s canvas. Where does one look first?

What should one focus on? What is important and what is
insignificant, and how can one be sure of the difference?

Church observes the world with Humboldt’s eye for diver-
sity and wonder. And Darwin does as well. While traveling in
South America on the Beagle in 1832, Darwin wrote in a letter
to his mentor, J. S. Henslow, “I formerly admired Humboldt,
I now almost adore him; he alone gives any notion of the
feelings which are raised in the mind on entering the trop-
ics.”30 In Darwin’s autobiography, written at the end of his
life, he names Humboldt’s Personal Narrative – about those

South American travels that would inspire both Darwin’s
Beagle journeys and Church’s treks through the Andes – as

one of the two books that “stirred up in me a burning zeal to
add even the most humble contribution to the noble struc-

ture of Natural Science. No one or a dozen other books

influenced me nearly so much.”31
Church owned Darwin’s journals from the Beagle voyages of

the 1830s, as well as a later volume entitled The Expression of
the Emotions in Man and Animals, published in 1872. Conspic-
uously absent is the major book between them: The Origin of
Species . Church would certainly have been aware of the book’s
claims. But, despite his passionate interest in science, it seems
that the painter could not reconcile Darwin’s theory of evo-
lution with his Protestant faith. He certainly would never have
intentionally created a Darwinian composition. Yet, in a
strangely poignant paradox, it is his attempt at a visual tribute
to Humboldt that brings him closer to Darwin.

Darwin and Church are both, in a sense, too good at the
details. Darwin looked too closely at too much for too long to
deny what he observed: the brutal but beautiful process of
natural selection. Church is brilliant at representing the nat-
ural world, and a kind of giddy enthusiasm for his own ability
permeates The Heart of the Andes. Church pushes scientific
realism to its limit. He exceeds Humboldt’s advice to the

artist, and the result is a landscape that reveals an aesthetic of
information, a painting that tries to “say everything” and that
therefore cannot be resolved into that “large and appealing
thing.”

The Heart of the Andes has no declarative focal point. The sky
is nearly filled with darkened mountaintops and dense
clouds, blocking the metaphoric possibility of heavenly tran-
scendence. At the margins, roots form a twisted network of

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582 ART bulletin December 2013 volume xcv number 4

5 Church, The Heart of the Andes , detail showing tree roots
(artwork in the public domain; photograph © The Metro-
politan Museum of Art, provided by Art Resource, NY)

dark veins and arteries (Fig. 5); a calla lily is set close to the
artist’s signature (Fig. 6); branches cast a precise tangle of
shadows on an exposed rock; leaves are pocked with insect
bites (Fig. 7). The eye jumps from one spot to another.
Individual details may take on symbolic significance, such as
a white cross that appears beside a path in the left fore-
ground. Placed against the dark shadows, it is much more
arresting than the stone cross camouflaged by vines at the
lower left of The Andes of Ecuador. But here the bright trail
abruptly stops, disappearing into the underbrush, with no
apparent continuation. Symbolism does not extend beyond
the single detail. In the middle ground white buildings on the
banks of a body of water are visible, among them what seems
to be a mission, but because this church is so small and

removed from any discernible path, it is easy to miss this
religious marker.

What is impossible to miss, however, is a much more
worldly sign: the date and the artist’s signature “carved” into
the tree at the lower left (Fig. 6) . It is as if a spotlight in the
exhibition hall had been trained on this part of the painting.
This is a sign of the artist’s presence, a version of “I was here”
as well as “This is mine.” Placed in the immediate fore-

ground, Church’s illuminated signature is more prominent
than the cross farther along the trail. The sign of the indi-
vidual precedes the icon of Christian salvation. The artist also

6 Church, The Heart of the Andes , detail showing the artist’s
signature on a tree trunk (artwork in the public domain;
photograph © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, provided by
Art Resource, NY)

7 Church, The Heart of the Andes , detail showing branches,
shadows, and leaves (artwork in the public domain;
photograph © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, provided
by Art Resource, NY)

references himself through the inclusion of a waterfall in the
foreground, an element that echoes Niagara. The artist’s
body of work and the artist’s body – his signature “on” the

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FREDERIC CHURCH AND THE CULTURE OF DETAIL 5g3

8 “The Heart of the Andes , ” by Frederic
ChurcĶ as Exhibited at the Metropolitan
Sanitary Fair , 1864, stereograph,
negative no. 61263. The New-York
Historical Society (artwork in the
public domain; photograph provided
by The New-York Historical Society)

9 Homage to Church ‘s Picture , ” The Heart of the Andes” cover of
“Marche di Bravura, the Andes/’ by George William Warren
(New York: William A. Pond, 1863). Olana State Historic Site,
New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic
Preservation, OL. 1983.279 (artwork in the public domain;
photograph provided by the New York State Office of Parks,
Recreation and Historic Preservation)

white bark – locate the self in the extravagant landscape.
Subjectivity is highlighted over spiritual symbolism.

On May 1, 1859, just four days after The Heart of the Andes
was first presented to the public, Thoreau wrote in his jour-
nal, “Science is inhuman. Things seen with a microscope
begin to be insignificant. . . . With our prying instruments we
disturb the balance and harmony of nature.”32 The whole-
ness imagined by Romanticism and the organic unity theo-
rized by scientists like Humboldt no longer seemed possible
by 1859. Church and Thoreau both appear to sense this, their
work consumed ever more by details, while their desire to
transcend the “insignificant” detail remained.

Grasping
Crowds flocked to see The Heart of the Andes. Over a mere
three-week period, more than twelve thousand people paid
twenty-five cents each to view Church’s painting when it was
first unveiled in New York City. The painting debuted in an
exhibition hall on Broadway before being moved to the
gallery at the Tenth Street Studio Building, where Church
had begun renting a studio the year before.33 Several police-
men had to be called in to keep the street clear.34 The picture
was shown alone, in an elaborately carved black walnut shad-
owbox frame (Fig. 8), surrounded by swags of jewel-toned
fabric, and strikingly illuminated.35 Booklets were published
about the painting, poems written, sermons given, and a
musical score – a march by George William Warren (Fig.
9) – composed in its honor. Church had achieved a status
unlike any other American artist in history.36

Announcements for The Heart of the Andes “requested” that
visitors bring opera glasses to view the painting.37 Opera
glasses provided a means to see the picture from afar amid
the crowds of people while also cutting out the periphery – all
those jostling bodies competing to see the landscape, as if
they themselves were enacting the competition between de-
tails on Church’s canvas. Such magnification also intensifies
the painting’s dizzying effect. The spectator was therefore
invited to see the picture in two ways: as a whole, with the
naked eyes, from a relative distance; and as isolated details
from a magnified proximity. Each viewer could also move
between part and whole, detail and effect, creating an ever-

shifting narrative for the painting through the subjective act
of looking.

A shrewd businessman and self-promoter, Church em-
ployed an agent who took his celebrated canvas to eight other
American cities and across the Atlantic to London following
its debut in New York. Mark Twain, then a young riverboat

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584 ART bulletin December 2013 volume xcv number 4

captain named Samuel Clemens, saw the canvas three times
when it traveled to Saint Louis in 1861, each time using opera
glasses. “I have just returned,” he wrote to his brother, “from
a visit to the most wonderfully beautiful painting which this
city has ever seen – Church’s ‘Heart of the Andes.’ ” He
proclaimed in his letter that it was “always a new picture –
totally new – you seem to see nothing the second time which
you saw the first.” While the composition may be “tame” and
“ordinary-looking,” the details make increasing demands on
his attention, each possessing “a marked and distinct person-
ality.” By the final visit he is overwhelmed.

your third visit will find your brain gasping and straining
with futile efforts to take all the wonder 11. . . . You will

never get tired of looking at the pictuj e, but your reflec-
tions – your efforts to grasp an intelligible Something –
you hardly know what – will grow so paini al that you will
have to go away from the thing, in order to obtain relief.
You may find relief, but you cannot banish the picture – it
remains with you still. It is in my mind now – and the
smallest feature could not be removed without my detect-
ing it. So much for the “Heart of the Andes.”38

Twain’s language points to the difference between looking
and interpreting, between seeing and knowing. Although
“[y]ou will never get tired of looking at the picture,” that
“intelligible Something” remains painfully elusive. Visual “re-
lief’ may be possible by simply “go [ing] away from the thing,”
yet intellectual relief is not as easy. You may stop “gasping”
but the mind will continue its “efforts to grasp” meaning.
Forgetting even “the smallest feature” becomes nearly impos-
sible. The landscape is “so much” to see that it can only,
finally, be left behind: “So much for the ‘Heart of the An-
des.’ ” This final phrase flirts with dismissal and yet, in the
context of the letter, seems more like necessity. Even Twain’s
attempt (literally and figuratively) at writing off the painting
contains what remains in the mind – “so much.” His words

reveal the painting’s visual power and the interpretative toll it
exacts.

Cutting
Seeing in detail – epitomized by seeing with opera glasses –
does not necessarily lead to greater understanding. This is a
critical point about Church’s picture, and about the poten-
tially paradoxical role detail can assume in visual art. Georges
Didi-Huberman provocatively explores this question of detail
and knowledge or, rather, the difference …