Frederick Edwin
Church

American landscape painter of the Hudson river school, was born in Hartford, Connecticut.

In the biography of Frederic Church's training took place with Thomas Cole in Catskill, new York. Then Frederick was travelling, and meanwhile drew, North, South America, Europe. He was a consummate master of panoramic scenes. Church painted exotic and foreign landscapes as well as mother nature, working with images which are highly evaluated by other participants of schools.

Born in Hartford to a wealthy family. At the age of 18 years began teaching in the Catskill (NY) Thomas Cole, one of the leading American artists of the time. In may 1848 he was invited to hold a solo exhibition at the National Academy of design, after which he sold one of his paintings in Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, the oldest public art Museum in the USA. In the same year the Church opened a workshop in new York and took the first disciple, William Stillman.

The Church worked hard in nature, making sketches from spring to autumn, and finishing and selling work in the winter. In 1853 and again in 1857 he traveled in South America (Ecuador), creating a series of mountain landscapes, considered the most characteristic works of the American romanticism. One of the paintings, written materials travel, "Heart of the Andes" (1859, now in the Metropolitan Museum, new York), was sold for $ 10,000, which at the time was the highest sum ever paid for a painting by the American artist. From 1854 to 1856 he travelled to Canada and New England. In particular, he, along with Cole was one of the first residents leaving for the summer on the island of mount desert in Maine, now Acadia national Park. During these years he visited Niagara falls.

As a rule, the Church was exhibited along with other landscape painters: Thomas Cole, Asher brown Durand. by John Frederick Kensett and Jasper Francis Cropsey. This Association is called the Hudson river school.

In 1860 Frederic Church married Isabel Carnes and bought a farm on the Hudson river in upstate new York. Their first two children died of diphtheria at the age of five and six years, but later they had four more children. In 1867 the Church visited Europe, North Africa and the middle East. In 1870 he built a castle in eclectic style in his estate in Alone. For design was hired as architect, but the Church took an active part in the design of the castle. Now the estate of the Church has the status of a historical monument of the state (eng. State Historic Site) and open to the public.

In the last thirty years of his life the Church could not write large canvases rheumatism. His legacy this time consists of a large number of studies performed in two of his manors in Olane and lake Millinocket in Maine, and in Mexico, where he spent the winter of 1882.

Almost all the works of the Church represent the scenery of the monumental forms, often painted in a dramatic red tone.