Heart of the Andes

Church made two expeditions to Ecuador in 1853 and 1857, following the itinerary laid out by the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt in his Cosmos, a book Church treated as a manifesto for what he called a scientific sublime. Heart of the Andes was completed in New York in 1859 and exhibited there under theatrical conditions: the canvas, measuring roughly ten by five and a half feet, was displayed in a darkened room, lit by concealed gas jets, and framed by drapery to simulate a window onto the tropics. Viewers paid admission and examined the surface through opera glasses; twelve thousand people saw it in three weeks. It then toured to London, where it was admired by Ruskin's circle and sold to William T. Blodgett, later entering the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where it remains. The painting sits at the apex of the Hudson River School, a tradition that understood landscape painting as a moral and scientific argument for the grandeur of the New World, and Church's encyclopedic ambition, cataloguing geology, botany, meteorology and theology inside a single frame, pushed that tradition to its outer limit. It was also a conscious visual answer to Humboldt's call for an artist who could synthesise the totality of tropical nature into a single image.