Frederic Church Painting Promised to the Huntington

The Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens has acquired a major American landscape painting, “Chimborazo” (1864), a monumental work by Frederic E. Church depicting the jungle and mountainous highlands of Ecuador.

The luminous painting, which will go on view today in the Virginia Steele Scott Gallery, is a promised gift from the Virginia Steele Scott Foundation. Further details of the acquisition were not disclosed.

“It’s the most important painting to come into our fledgling collection of American art,” said Huntington curator Robert Wark. He noted Church’s stature as a leading 19th-Century painter and the fact that, thematically, landscape dominated American and European art of the time. Citing the “extraordinary” condition of the painting--one of the artist’s greatest--Ward added, “I haven’t quite come down to earth yet.”

Seen at the Huntington the other day, the painting’s foreground is filled with lush tropical foliage and a river reflecting the fecund greenery. Chimborazo, a snow-covered volcanic mountain, rises majestically in the distance above a range of smaller cloud-enshrouded Andean peaks. A scholar once called the work Church’s “ultimate in cosmic pastoral landscape.”

Church (1826-1900) was a pioneering member of the Hudson River School, the native movement that glorified the American wilderness. Yet his forte was paintings of exotic landscapes inspired by travels to distant lands. “Chimborazo,” which resulted from two trips to Ecuador and Colombia, is one-third of a South American landscape triptych recently exhibited in “American Landscape” at New York’s Metropolitan Museum.

“The artist was aiming for more than a simple portrait of place,” Wark said, adding that “Chimborazo” represents many of the key elements of mid-19th-Century landscape painting: accurate and abundant depictions of botanical, geological and meteorological details; a transcendent view of nature espoused by Emerson, Thoreau and others; a vibrant, modulated use of color and dramatic lighting effects.

While Church painted “Chimborazo” at the height of his career, his reputation was waning when the work was exhibited in 1876, eight years after its completion.

However, with the renewed interest in American painting of the last 30 years, the works of Church and his contemporaries have once again become fashionable. The artist has in that time been the subject of major exhibitions and, in 1980, the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts bought his “Icebergs” for more than $2 million.

OTHER ACQUISITIONS: The La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art has been given three major contemporary figurative paintings by California artists: “Henry Inn No. 5” (1978) and “Ruin VI” (1981-82) by Charles Garabedian, and “Nothing to Blame (1979) (plus three drawings) by William T. Wiley. The museum also recently purchased “Still Life With Watermelon” (1986-87), a large-scale painting by contemporary artist Gregory Gillespie of Massachusetts. The paintings will be exhibited in “Permanent Collection II,” beginning Saturday.

The Palm Springs Desert Museum has recently been given four contemporary artworks: one oil painting, “The Quick and the Dead” (1980-1986), and two lithographs, “Shipping” (1954) and “The Wrangler” (1953), by Southwest artist Theodore Van Soelen, and “Deck of the House in Malibu,” a watercolor by Bay Area artist Paul Wonner.

GRANTS: The University of California Press, noted for art book publishing, has received a grant from the local Lannan Foundation to launch a series of books about modern and contemporary art.

The Lannan Series will include writings by seminal contemporary art critics, major critics whose work has not before been collected, and artists. Books in the series may also feature a number of critics addressing a single theme.

COMPETITION: Artists are invited to submit proposals for the design and production of three exterior projects in three Santa Barbara county parks.

The Santa Barbara County Arts Commission, in conjunction with the Santa Barbara County Park Department, is sponsoring two competitions for the works to be placed in Rincon Park, Carpinteria; Manning Park, Montecito, and Tucker’s Grove Park, Goleta.

The works in Tucker’s Grove and Manning Parks will be playground equipment for preschool children. The work in Rincon Park is a collaborative art-landscape-poetry project.

Submission deadline is April 1. Finalists will be announced in May and will receive $500 to develop final proposals due in June.

The projects are part of the Art in Public Places Program of the County of Santa Barbara. Information: Maria de Herrera, (805) 568-3430.