Frederic Church

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The Art and Science of Detail

Jennifer Raab

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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.

Jennifer Raab is assistant professor of the history of art at Yale University.

"Elegantly and clearly written, this book is full of exciting and original interpretations. It offers a rich engagement with detail not as mere carrier of iconography but as an aesthetic problem in itself."—Jennifer L. Roberts, Harvard University

"An ambitious and exciting study that pushes forward into new and vital interpretive terrain. This book promises to reconfigure the discourse of the field and the story of American art."—Rachael Z. DeLue, Princeton University

"It is said that the devil is in the details and this ambitious book succeeds at articulating Church’s visual vernacular and how his scientific-like attention to detail can be balanced in the viewer’s experience in beholding his landscapes to integrate the whole with the parts . . . Beautifully illustrated, this book challenges one’s approach to seeing and presents Church’s landscapes in a new light."—Andrea Valluzzo, Antiques & the Arts Weekly

"Essential reading for any student and scholar of American history and art."—Rachael DeLue, Critical Inquiry

"A subtle book that raises the study of Church and early American landscape to new heights of intellectual ambition."—Christopher Riopelle, The Art Newspaper
ISBN: 9780300208375
Publication Date: November 3, 2015
240 pages, 8 1/2 x 10 1/2
60 color + 43 b/w illus.
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