As a celebrated practitioner of the Hudson River School, Frederic Church was renowned for his sweeping natural vistas and dramatic, cloud-filled skies. But while on a trip to the Mediterranean countries from 1867 to 1869, he set aside his reverence for the untouched natural beauty and focused instead on the glory of past civilizations, what humans had created and which had crumbled into relics.
A traveling exhibit making a summerlong stopover at Wadsworth Atheneum focuses on this period in Church’s life as a painter, when he took his wife, child and mother-in-law to Rome, Beirut, Jerusalem, Athens, Jaffa, Petra, Baalbek and other ancient cities. He mingled with Bedouins, rode camels, stared at the Parthenon from every angle, gazed at Jerusalem from atop a hill, looked out at the ocean from the Syrian coast and recreated them all on canvas.
The exhibit originated at Detroit Institute of Arts and went to the Reynolda House in North Carolina before coming to Hartford. Erin Monroe, the Atheneum’s curator of American paintings and sculpture, said that while many European painters depicted these views, Church was the first American to capture these very non-American aspects. Some were done during the trip, others after Church returned home.
“Instead of giant trees and Niagara Falls, he was fascinated by architecture, ancient history, ruins, monuments. That’s a big shift,” said Monroe. “In America, we don’t have that kind of architecture.
“He was turning his attention to human history, to the civilizations that came before us, which had risen and fallen,” Monroe said. “This was just after the U.S. Civil War. When we travel to places of the ancient past, what can we learn about how to recover from war, restructuring, rebuilding?”
The map of the Middle East is different than in Church’s time, and many of the cities are in different countries now; the Syria he depicted in his painting “Syria by the Sea” contains parts of present-day Jordan and Turkey as well as parts of Palestine.
Church was especially reverential at the Parthenon, which he bathes in a rosy glow, in radiant sunshine, while the observer sits in the shadows. Its cloudless sky was unlike the vivid skies usually associated with Church. Conversely, the sky Church created over his panoramic view of Jerusalem – a holy city in the Christian, Jewish and Muslim religions – is so vivid it almost resembles an oncoming sandstorm.
Monroe said the variation in depiction of skies could have reflected Church’s fascination with the intellectualism of the classical lands, which was different from his devout Christianity.
“Church was an admirer of ancient Greek civilization, especially architecture, its symmetry, its balance, its simplicity. It was representative of reason and rationality,” she said. “In Jerusalem, you have a divine feeling about the sky. It’s a testament to the religions, to this sacred city.”
That same rosy glow was used to depict tombs carved into rocks in Petra, where Church, in his diary, gloried in the variation of salmon, pink and red reflected off of the stones.
At times, religious concerns placed obstacles in Church’s way. Devout Muslims resisted his desire to depict living creatures in his artworks, so he had a hard time persuading the Bedouins to let him paint their portraits. At other times, they helped. Church and his family often used missionaries associated with Syrian Protestant College as guides through the countries.
One American landscape is included in the exhibit, Church’s 1846 depiction of Rev. Thomas Hooker on a journey to Hartford in 1636. Monroe said that painting illustrates how Church placed himself within the framework of his devout faith, as well as his interest in the Holy Lands.
“He liked to put autobiographical elements into his paintings to reference how he thought about pilgrimage,” she said. “It can be seen as an allegory of the flight of the Holy Family.”
After returning from his trip, Church’s father died and left him a fortune, and Church began showing signs of the rheumatoid arthritis that made painting difficult. So he spent the last few decades of his life lavishing money on the design and construction of Olana, his home in Greenport, N.Y.
He designed the house with a miscellany of influences: Victorian, Persian, Moorish and Italianate. When asked by a reporter, he made clear the house’s debt to his earlier journeys, calling its style “Persian, adapted to the Occident.”
FREDERIC CHURCH: A PAINTER’S PILGRIMAGE is at Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, 600 Main St. in Hartford, until Aug. 26. A lecture, “Sacred Geographies: Frederic Church, the Holy Land & the Hudson Valley,” by Yale Prof. Jennifer Raab, will be June 12 at 6 p.m. thewadsworth.org.
