The son of a wealthy insurance adjustor in Hartford, Connecticut (even in the 1820s long established as the centre for insurance in America, as well as an industrial city), Church was at first trained by two local artists and was something of a prodigy, for the years 1844-46 he spent with Thomas Cole in Catskill, NY, who had never before accepted a pupil. It was under the tutelage of Cole, then the foremost of American landscape painters, that the summer sketching trips began; he also inculcated in his pupil something of his own increasingly religious and mystical response to landscape, as though it were the source of some moral and spiritual benefit to man. In Cole?s footprints Church followed with The Deluge and The Plague of Darkness, both now lost, but their titles are enough to communicate a sense of religious fervour and the biblical businesses of Apocalypse and Armageddon; but in a surviving history painting of 1846, Hooker and Company in the Wilderness, evoking a journey to Hartford made by an ancestor, Church chose instead a pristine Eden that owes more to the serenity of Claude Lorrain than to the realities of Connecticut or his own imagined frights and fantasies.
It was a time in America not only of strong Protestant evangelical revival, with its sense of divine right, even obligation, to spread throughout the land, but of the commercial exploitation and political expansion that were to create the United States as we have known them throughout the 20th century. Unconsciously, perhaps, Church and such of his contemporaries as Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran, in awe of what they saw as transcendental and sublime in Nature?s grandeur, golden and serene in his beneficence, thunderously apocalyptic in malevolence, furthered the cause of Protestant imperialism. Here, in Britain, familiar with the extravagant terribility of John Martin?s paintings and Turner?s intermittent obsessions with wind, water and imminent death, catastrophe and avalanche, we admired Church?s Great Pictures when they were sent here for exhibition, seeing them as of the same ilk, unaware of their religio-political implications.
One of them, Niagara Falls From the American Side, now on view with his sketches in the National Gallery, was exhibited in the Haymarket in 1868 when we were much more aware of this genre of American painting than we are now. Church had painted the Falls as a panorama a decade earlier, in 1857, and this later view is based, not on oil sketches, but on a pencil drawing made when preparing for that picture (but not then used) and on a commercial sepia photograph over which, rather thinly, he painted in oils. This is a nasty little thing greatly inferior to his pure sketches, and the date of his tinting it is not recorded, though the National Gallery curators firmly date it August 1858 ? yet Church visited Niagara several times in 1851 and after, and exhibited the panorama in 1857. There is no evidence that he ever repeated this unsatisfactory procedure. Bierstadt, I observe in passing, began taking his own photographs in 1859, but as aides-m?moire, not the underdrawing of oil sketches.
It is odd that of all the Great Pictures by Church that could have been exhibited coherently with the sketches that are the subject of this exhibition, the curators chose this, so little connected with his sketching practice; I presume that they did so because it belongs to the National Gallery of Scotland and could be transported to London less expensively than, for example, The Icebergs of 1861, now in Dallas. I admit that Ruskin thought it marvellous in that it conformed with his eye for truth and detail, with a dramatic nod to sublimity in the clouds and rainbow beneath our feet, and to Martin?s Waters of Oblivion in the pair of tiny figures precarious on the flimsy viewing platform silhouetted on the upper left, but it lacks the substantial painterliness of the often enchanting oil sketches.
As there are in the exhibition three sketches of icebergs (one of them finished enough to stand as the independent picture that it really is) and one of a frozen lake, it would have been more sensible (and more thrilling) to have borrowed the Dallas picture, a chilling evocation of death, disaster and Nature?s eternal hostility to man in the frozen north. It was greeted with formidable success in London, where it was bought by a Manchester MP; installed in his mansion, it was forgotten until rediscovery in 1979 and then exported without protest ? though the price paid, some $2.5?million, should have made us think. It is, of course, another Great Picture, symbolic, religious and political, and the most extraordinary consequence of painting in the open air; it was developed from perhaps as many as a hundred sketches executed in the summer of 1859 from the deck of a small schooner and on Church?s lap in a rowing-boat, by a man for whom seasickness was an ever-present demon. These sketches are, in the circumstances, wonderfully assured, the work of a man whose intellectual certainty commands his skills, his record of observation immediate and precise, yet ? above all ? painterly.
It is this painterliness that gives the true sketches such beauty and such charm ? neither of which is invariably present in the exhibited examples. Some are less sketches than small paintings, highly finished, irrelevant and tiresomely pernickety in a Ruskinian sense ? witness the gloomy Coast of Grand Manan Island, Campfire, Maine Woods, and Fern Walk, Jamaica, in none of which is there any characteristic evidence of urgency, of wet paint scored by the bristles of the sweeping brush, the blank foreground not so much unfinished as never begun, yet acting as an effective repoussoir into the distance that is the prime subject of the sketch.
This exhibition does Church scant justice. Of 28 exhibits, the Niagara painting and three sketches were shown in Tate Britain in 2002, and are not new to us, one is a tinted photograph, another an overpainted lithograph, that of The El Deir Monument in Petra is downright bad, inexcusably ill-drawn and uncharacteristically rough in handling (yet, for its ?smooth, confident brushstrokes? ludicrously praised by the curators), and five or more must count as finished paintings ? yet there are hundreds of unfamiliar real sketches from which to choose. It seems that the curators were more interested in revealing a variety of uncommon (but not repeated) technical processes and demonstrating the extent of Church?s travels, than in defining the oil sketch as opposed to the finished picture of much the same small size. That the small best of Church?s sketches in this uneven selection could hang unashamed with the sketches of Constable, Corot and Degas is an indication of what we might have had, if only...
My final grumble is that never have I seen an exhibition at the National Gallery so badly presented. Some years ago I commented on the shoddy frames of a collection of Swiss and Norwegian landscapes ? but they were the property of a private American collector; these sketches by Church belong to major institutions that should promote taste, yet some are in cheap mounts of so stark a white that all tonal values are disrupted, and others are in frames so wretched that even the dealers of Portobello Road would feel compelled to discard them. Do American curators eat lobster thermidor from paper plates with plastic spoons?
Through American Eyes: Frederic Church and the Landscape Oil Sketch is at the National Gallery, WC2 (020 7747 2885, nationalgallery.org.uk) until April 28. Open Sun-Thurs, 10am-6pm; Fri, 10am-9pm. Admission free
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