Frederic Edwin Church

Frederic Edwin Church knew how to make a single painting an event. His teacher Thomas Cole had founded American landscape painting, and Church pushed it toward spectacle. He would unveil one enormous, dazzling canvas at a time, in a darkened room, framed like a stage, and charge the public to file past it.

In 1859 he showed 'The Heart of the Andes', a vast, minutely detailed vision of South American mountains and jungle, and thousands paid to see the one picture, some bringing opera glasses to study its far corners. He had travelled to the Andes twice, following the routes of the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, and he painted Niagara, Arctic icebergs, and erupting volcanoes with the same appetite for the sublime.

With his success he built Olana, a Persian-styled mansion on a hill above the Hudson River, arranging its rooms and even its views like compositions. Late in life arthritis crippled his painting hand and all but stopped his work. He died in 1900, and Olana survives with his own paintings on its walls, kept much as he arranged it.