Beyond cradling hills, a limpid, haze-shrouded, suspended sun is reflected over a tranquil, oval lake, shores hugged by greens and russet browns. Drawn leftward, my gaze meets the dreaded volcano, slopes glacier-grey. From its cratered vent, black gas and ash lurch upward to dissipate into vast clouds. Counterclockwise, ruddy moors, touched by the aura of that vigilant sun and by a veneer of translucent spray, push to the brink of a multitiered waterfall, or the spirit of a waterfall; at lower right, a row of cliffs stand, impassive.
In my approach, I discern three white flecks against chiseled rocks – birds in flight.
The renowned American landscape artist Frederic Church was an inveterate traveller, intoxicated by the undisturbed terrains of South America. In 1853 and 1857, he journeyed to the outskirts of Quito, in central Ecuador, to behold the notorious, nineteen-thousand foot tall mountain looming before me. Several en plein air sketches and studies ensued; the final Cotopaxi – commissioned by James Lenox, the DIA’s provenance tells us — was completed in 1862 at Church’s West 10th Street Studio in Manhattan.
The masterpiece, presented in the American Galleries at the Detroit Institute of Arts in celebration of the two hundredth anniversary of the artist’s birth, is accompanied by two chaste marble sculptures by Church’s contemporary, Randolph Rogers, installed on either side.
The Lost Pleiad, (1888), Merope, ostracized from the company of the gods because she married a mortal, left hand shading her brow, seeks her six sisters in the chartless heavens. And to the right, Nydia, the Blind Girl of Pompeii (ca. 1850), attempts to guide companions out of the ash-strewn city in the aftermath of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Eyes shut, left hand cupped over her ear, anxious for the safety and solace of the seaside, she listens for a telltale wave-surge.
Speculating upon the curatorial decisions that resulted in this mise en scene, I recall Church’s reverent painting of the Parthenon (1869-1871), aglow and on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art: “Daily I study its stones,” the artist wrote, “and feel its inexpressible charm of beauty growing on my senses.” As did many of his contemporaries, Church cherished the sublime legacy of antiquity residing at the heart of American Romanticism. In that spirit, perhaps sculptor Rogers’ sense-deprived nymphs, so close at hand, are my involuntary gatekeepers, backs turned to the canvas, straining eyes and ears seducing me to participate in its primal imagery.
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The periphery of this grand room, illuminated by natural and artificial light, contextualizes Cotopaxi via a display of works by Frederic Church’s colleagues in the broadly-conceived Hudson River School movement. These four are from the institution’s permanent collection.
First among them, of course, is Thomas Cole, young Church’s laudatory mentor from 1844 to 1846. From the Top of Kaaterskill Falls (1826), less than twenty miles from Cole’s studio in Catskill, New York, promotes the painter’s ethos of spectacle; while Sunset on the Arno (1837-38), demonstrates Cole’s nostalgia-play, clothing denizens of the nineteenth century city in sixteenth century fashion. John Frederick Kensett’s Cascade in the Forest (1852) is an exemplar of the artist’s restrained, so-called “Luminist” palette. And Sunset after a Storm in the Catskill Mountains (1860) by architect-turned-painter Jasper Francis Cropsey, employs the omnivorous palette and long-lensed, moody perspective, resonant with Frederick Church’s, capturing a field at equilibrium in the wake of turbulence.
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I pause at the arched entrance to the gallery for an au revoir look at Cotopaxi. I knew of Church’s global reach; however, had more familiarly claimed him as the homegrown, big-thinking inhabitant of his riverside estate, Olana, overseeing the mighty Hudson. This special Guests of Honor exhibition has coerced me into taking in the whole – albeit exotic — painting as one made thing, ideas of order imagined, applied, and revealed by one man’s ambitious conviction that the mythic past informs his immediate present…
…and that the local – wherever on earth the artist may be – glorifies the Universal.
[Frederic Edwin Church, Cotopaxi, 1862. Oil on canvas. Detroit Institute of Arts, Founders Society Purchase, Robert H. Tannahill Foundation Fund, Gibbs-Williams Fund, et. al., 76.89.]