Study for "The Parthenon"

On 26 September 1687 a Venetian army was besieging the Ottoman garrison on the Acropolis in Athens, and the defenders had stored gunpowder inside the Parthenon. A mortar shell set it off. The explosion tore out the middle of the temple, its roof, its inner walls and several columns on each long side, and left the two ends standing apart. That broken shape is the building Frederic Church painted in 1869.

He saw it emptier than travellers of the previous century had. After the blast a small mosque was built inside the ruined shell, and it stood there for well over a century, until the Greek authorities took it down in the 1840s as they cleared the hill of everything later than the classical buildings.

Church made this study in oil on paper, which was mounted on canvas afterwards, and the museum dates it 1869 to 1870. He used studies like it for the large Parthenon he painted in 1871, which is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.