New light on Frederic Church's "late" work.(Critical essay)

The exhibition Frederic Edwin Church: Romantic Landscapes and Seascapes, opening at Adelson Galleries in New York City on January 18, agreeably includes three important late works by the artist: The Aegean Sea of 1878 (Fig. 3); Springtime in the Levant of 1879 (Fig. 4); and Marine--Sunset of 1881 to 1882 (Fig. 1). While late is an imprecise term for Church, who was born in 1826 and died in 1900, several circumstances during the United States Centennial year, including major exhibitions and sales of his work and exaggerated (but partly true) rumors of a rheumatoid condition that inhibited his ability to paint, were defining for him. (1)

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This essay surveys Church's life and career between 1877and 1882, a period largely bypassed in modern scholarship on the artist and which culminated in four exhibitions of three new medium-sized paintings at three New York City locations between December 1881 and April 1882. Marine--Sunset (Fig. 1) was presented at the Century Association in March 1882. Evening in the Tropics (Fig. 6) was shown two or (probably) three times, once at the Union League Club and twice at the Century, between December 1881 and March 1882. And Al Ayn (The Fountain) (Fig. 7) was exhibited at Church's long-time dealer, Goupil and Company, M. Knoedler, Successor, as it was then called, during March and April 1882. Discussed here for the first time, the inaugural presentations of these paintings were complemented by regional viewings of eight earlier works by Church, (2) and by ample press reporting. Four New York City area newspapers led by the Mail and Express, and journals elsewhere in the Northeast, were boosting Church's celebrity in language reminiscent of a quarter century earlier, when he was at the pinnacle of his career.

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Church followed his presentations of 1882 at the Century Association with three more during 1883, another in 1884, and, eventually, others in 1891 and 1894. Of his three paintings shown at the Union League Club during the mid- and late 1880s, one, Evening, Mexico (perhaps the painting today known as Mexican Lake Scene, 1885; private collection), which he debuted on March 9, 1885, was a new work. So far as I know, however, only the Mexican scene received press notice, and that briefly. His small canvas of late 1882, On the Mediterranean (Olana State Historic Site, Hudson, New York), acquired by the public-minded collector Thomas B. Clarke (1848-1931), generated sporadic comments during the 1880s and 1890s, proportionate to the size of the painting and the scope of the surrounding works by other artists owned by Clarke. Thus, Church's outreaches of 1881 and 1882 amounted to a double valedictory: what were nearly his final consequential exhibitions of new paintings during his lifetime generated the last substantive coverage of him in the American press before his death.

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