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. Beautifully illustrated with dramatic spreads and striking details of Church’s works, Frederic Church: The Art and Science of Detail offers a profoundly new understanding of this canonical artist.

Frederic Church: The Art and Science of Detail

Arts & Photography

Raab, Jennifer

History & Criticism

Yale University Press

An important reconsideration of landscape photography in 19th-century America, exploring crucial but neglected geographies, practitioners, and themes Although pictures of the West have dominated our perception of 19th-century American landscape photography, many photographers were working in the eastern half of the United States during that period. Their pictures, with the exception of Civil War images, have received relatively scant attention. Redressing this imbalance is East of the Mississippi, the first book to focus exclusively on the arresting eastern photographs that helped shape America’s national identity. Celebrating natural wonders such as Niagara Falls and the White Mountains as well as capturing a cultural landscape fundamentally altered by industrialization, these works also documented the impact of war, promoted tourism, and played a role in an emerging environmentalism. Showcasing more than 180 photographs from 1839 to 1900 in a rich variety of media and formats—from daguerreotypes, salted paper prints, tintypes, cyanotypes, and albumen prints to stereo cards and photograph albums—this volume traces the evolution of eastern landscape photography and introduces the artists who explored this subject. Also considered are the dynamic ties with other media—for instance, between painters and photographers such as the Bierstadt and Moran brothers—and the distinctive development of landscape photography in America.

East of the Mississippi: Nineteenth-Century American Landscape Photography

Lord, Russell

Waggoner, Diane

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Landscape art in the early 19th century was guided by two rival concepts: the picturesque, which emphasized touristic pleasures and visual delight, and the sublime, an aesthetic category rooted in notions of fear and danger. British artists including J.M.W. Turner and John Constable raised landscape painting to new heights and their work reached global audiences through the circulation of engravings. Thomas Cole, born in England, emigrated to the United States in 1818, and first absorbed the picturesque and sublime through print media. Cole transformed British and continental European traditions to create a distinctive American form of landscape painting. The authors here explore the role of prints as agents of artistic transmission and look closely at how Cole’s own creative process was driven by works on paper such as drawings, notebooks, letters, and manuscripts. Also considered is the importance of the parallel works of William Guy Wall, best known for his pioneering Hudson River Portfolio. Beautifully illustrated with works on paper ranging from watercolors to etchings, mezzotints, aquatints, engravings, and lithographs, as well as notable paintings, this book offers important insights into Cole’s formulation of a profound new category in art—the American sublime.

Picturesque and Sublime: Thomas Cole's Trans-Atlantic Inheritance

Barringer, Tim

Forrester, Gillian

Individual Artists

Relics of War: The History of a Photograph

Princeton University Press

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Books by Raab, Jennifer