Niagara

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...

Frederic Edwin Church’s great painting The Icebergs (fig. 1), the subject of this book, affirms this epigraph. The story of The Icebergs is a kaleidoscope—of talent, adventure, and eye-popping spectacle; of science, colonialism, and multinational wishful thinking...

Seen from a distance, the painting is controlled by a strong but simple geometry. The rectangular form of the canvas is echoed in the long band of sky. The straight edge of the horizon line divides the image horizontally. The cataract stretches nearly the entire length of the more than seven-and-a-half-foot picture, the diagonal of the near rim and...

One of the curious ironies in the history of American art concerns the bond which links John Trumbull to Thomas Cole, founder of an American landscape school. It was Trumbull who first made Cole known to a large public after seeing the works of the fledgling landscapist in the window of a New York framemaker in 1825...