Niagara

When Church unveiled this in May 1857, he did not hang it in a crowded salon. He put it alone in a darkened New York room, lit like a stage, and charged 25 cents to see it. Crowds came, more than 100,000 people over the run, and one magazine claimed it was already better known than any picture ever painted in America. Church had gone to the falls repeatedly with sketchbooks, and the result is unusually exact, the water's weight and speed observed almost scientifically rather than dramatized. He set the horizon high and left out the near shoreline, so the viewer seems to hover over the brink itself. It arrived while the country was still filling in its own map westward.