Brush stroke explorations: American-born Frederic Edwin Church, whose grand canvases were created with precise accuracy and sublime form, exemplified landscape paintings during an age of discovery.

• Author: Reidell, Heidi

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In an age when a photograph taken with a cell phone can instantly beam across the globe, it may be hard to imagine an unseen, yet to be discovered world, or to appreciate how a young, scientifically-minded American artist, Frederic Edwin Church, could reveal the grandeur of the nineteenth century Western hemisphere to a curious world.

As California-bound gold rushers bypassed South America in clipper ships and America's Civil War pitted brother against brother, Frederic Church was fast becoming America's most influential and financially successful landscape painter. His billboard sized paintings were each presented as a single work of art at greatly anticipated events. They were shown by ticketed admission in dramatically set, gas lit rooms; draped with black crepe theatrical curtains and surrounded by exotic plants; and presented in ornate frames that resembled the windows of a grand mansion revealing breathtaking vistas rendered with almost photographic precision. Church amazed America and the British Isles with spectacles of erupting volcanoes; thundering waterfalls; tropical rain forests illuminated by complete double rainbows; and the Aurora Borealis above towering icebergs. These formidable works of art gave his audience views of places they would otherwise never have been able to see in their lifetime.

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Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900), a direct descendant of Hartford, Connecticut founder Richard Church, was a fifth generation American and the son of a silversmith/jeweler/insurance adjuster, who hoped his son would enter the business world. But what energetic young man of vision wanted to sit behind a desk during an age of discovery?

Frederic Church's vision was shaped by the exciting discoveries and explorations of his day. He was sixteen years old when America's Exploratory Expedition, led by Charles Wilkes, returned from four years of circumnavigating the world; mapping Antarctica and the Pacific Northwest; and descending into Hawaii's volcanoes. The expedition's artist, Titian Peale, the son of a famous painter and Philadelphia museum founder, had an accurate eye and was also an expert marksman. In addition to his sketches, he brought back 2,150 birds, 134 mammals, and 588 species of fish in the largest collection ever obtained from an expedition.

In his book about the Exploratory Expedition, Seas of Glory, historian Nathaniel Philbrick wrote, "A trip to the Pacific was equivalent to a modern day trip to the moon; voyages of discovery offered scientists a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to investigate exotic habitats--rain forests, volcanoes, tropical lagoons, icebergs, and deserts--bringing back specimens.... In an era before photography, artists were a crucial part of any expedition, providing drawings and paintings that were later used to create illustrations for the published scientific reports and the narrative." The historic four-year voyage yielded a stupefying amount of data. American historian William Goetzman explained, "The results of the expedition were...