Jennifer Raab
Jennifer Raab is assistant professor of art history at Yale University.
Raab, Jennifer
Raab, Jennifer
United States of America
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Description: Picturing the Americas: Landscape Painting from Tierra del Fuego to the Arctic
Nineteenth-century landscape paintings in the Americas were prompted by a desire to depict the hemisphere’s most remote regions, and were largely informed by scientific inquiry...
PublisherTerra Foundation for American Art
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.48-88
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00273.003
Description: Frederic Church: The Art and Science of Detail
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00051
Frederic Church (1826–1900), the most celebrated painter in the United States during the mid-19th century, created monumental landscapes of North and South America, the Arctic, and the Middle East. These paintings were unsurpassed in their attention to detail, yet the significance of this pictorial approach has remained largely unexplored. In this important reconsideration of Church's works, Jennifer Raab offers the first sustained examination of the aesthetics of detail that fundamentally shaped 19th-century American landscape painting. Moving between historical context and close readings of famous canvases—including Niagara, The Heart of the Andes, and The Icebergs—Raab argues that Church's art challenged an earlier model of painting based on symbolic unity, revealing a representation of nature with surprising connections to scientific discourses of the time. The book traces Church's movement away from working in oil on canvas to shaping the physical landscape of Olana, his self-designed estate on the Hudson River, a move that allowed the artist to rethink scale and process while also engaging with pressing ecological questions. In sum, Frederic Church: The Art and Science of Detail offers a profoundly new understanding of this canonical artist.
Print publication date November 2015 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300208375
EISBN 9780300234411
Illustrations 103 Illus.
Print Status in print