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| Frederic Edwin Church |
| 1826-1900 |
| American Artist |
| Church was born in Hartford, Connecticut. He received his early art training from local painters Benjamin Hutchins Coe and Alexander Hamilton Emmons. In 1844, with the help of the art patron Daniel Wadsworth, he became the first pupil of the painter Thomas Cole. Upon completing two years of training, Church moved to New York, where he established a studio in the Art-Union building. Church gradually began to take a more scientific approach to nature, using sketches he had created in the outdoors in the preparation of his canvases. For his spectacular and panoramic paintings of the wilderness of North and South America, his canvases celebrated the drama of the American frontier and expressed the expansionist and optimistic outlook of the United States in the mid-nineteenth century. |
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