Les Chutes du Niagara, côté américain

Church finished this, his largest canvas, in 1867, two years after the American Civil War ended. It was meant to travel to the Exposition Universelle in Paris and show a reunited United States at its most confident, through the one thing Europe could not match, its wilderness. In the end he sent an older Niagara to Paris and this one crossed to London, where crowds queued to feel the noise and spray coming off it. Church worked it up in the studio from quick sketches and a sepia photograph. 20 years later a Scottish-born New York financier, John Kennedy, bought it and gave it to Scotland, which is why the great American waterfall now hangs in Edinburgh.