Niagara Falls, from the American Side 1867

Here is nature untamed, powerrul, and on a grand scale: spectacular scenery cascading through the canvas. American landscape painter Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900) reveled in painting on a huge scale. Church's treatment of the rainbow, mist, and spume are all highly credible and his management of light and color shows great skill. It is a vivid record of pristine, virginal nature, and Church's worship of the wilderness strikes a chord with modern-day concerns about the environment. Emerging from the Hudson River School tradition of charting the great river and its tributaries, Church painted Niagara Falls on more than one occasion, each time from a different vantage point. His wanderlust also took him much further afield, to South America, following in the footsteps of the great Victorian explorer Baron von Humboldt from the Amazon to the Andes. He was influenced by Humbold's theories on how artists should relate to the physical world. Church's powerful and evocative landscapes were highly popular in Victorian times, with painter and poet Edward Lear calling the artist "the greatest landscape painter after Turner."