El Rio de Luz

By 1877 the huge, glowing wilderness paintings that had made Frederic Church the most famous artist in America were slipping out of fashion, crowded out by quieter European styles. This was his last large canvas of South America, and he painted it entirely from memory and old sketches drawn on a journey through the tropics more than twenty years earlier. Instead of the vast mountain panoramas of his youth, he chose something intimate: a still river at dawn, mist in the trees, a lone canoeist, birds crossing the water. Look near the front and there are two tiny hummingbirds perched close to the viewer. Church's own hands were beginning to fail him with rheumatism around this time, which makes the fine detail here quietly remarkable.