Celebrating an American Original : Washington exhibition restores 19th-Century landscape painter Frederic Edwin Church to his place on high

The American landscape painter Frederic Edwin Church was at the summit of celebrity in the mid-1800s. When his panoramic painting “The Heart of the Andes” was shown in New York in 1859, 12,000 visitors paid a quarter each for the awesome privilege of viewing it. Rumor had it that the artist received $20,000 for the picture when even half that sum would have been considered princely. He was Gary-Cooper handsome, traveled the world, married a beautiful lady and lived in an exotic Persian palace, called Olana, that had a magnificent view of the Hudson River.

Yet, by the time he died at 73 in 1900, he had been an artistic nonentity for decades.

Fate, however, is not merely fickle, she is downright capricious. Today reverential crowds once again gather around “The Heart of the Andes.” Now, at the prestigious National Gallery, the big painting acts as the hub of the first major exhibition devoted to the artist in a quarter-century. During that time Church has been revived with a vengeance. California got a hint of it in 1975 when Pomona College presented a sleeper exhibition of the forgotten artist. The world got the message in 1979 when his lost masterpiece “The Icebergs” sold at auction for a then-record $2.75 million.

Church’s rehabilitation was confirmed when he was included in the National’s brilliant 1980 exhibition “American Light,” which rediscovered Luminist painting. Now it is crowned by this retrospective, housed in the glossy I.M. Pei East Building (through Jan. 28). The show of about 50 impressive vistas is more than an aesthetic odyssey; it is an object lesson in the way the appreciation of an art can be created and destroyed by the climate of the times in which it is viewed.

The earliest Church on display is the 1847 “Storm on a Mountain.” In it a shattered tree sits on the edge of a cliff, half of its trunk toppled into the abyss as if by lightning. Roiling fog belches from the valley, and in the distance a mountain draws back from the scene like a disapproving dowager. The whole thing is almost laughably portentous, like bad Wagner.

As a matter of fact, it resembles nothing so much as the work of Church’s German contemporary, Caspar David Friedrich, with his intense doomsday symbolism. Another artist comes to mind when we look at “Morning” with its deep sea of red-tinted dawn clouds. It recalls Joseph Mallord William Turner, the great British Romantic innovator. There are also hints of other British landscapists, such as John Martin with his apocalyptic fascination with The Sublime.

None of which is to say that Church was unduly influenced by them. He studied with the visionary Hudson River painter Thomas Cole and didn’t visit Europe until his career was ripe. But he was an artist of his time participating in an international aesthetic preoccupation with landscape and its meanings.

The era was dominated by a natural science that interpreted the world as a near-religious expression of divine harmony. The critic John Ruskin carried these ideas in the art world and was read and admired by Church, but the artist’s real spiritual and intellectual hero was the German naturalist, teacher and author Alexander von Humboldt. He never met his mentor but was so deeply inspired by him that he followed his example in exploring South America and in seeing nature as a harmonious whole.

Church’s art became the principal expression of the particularly American version of these ideas--the belief in Manifest Destiny, the idea of America as a New Eden and the American as a New Adam.

Church was a thinker-artist interested in painting landscape to embody ideas and values. His philosophical bent shows even in the works’ quirks. Take “Heart of the Andes.” The nearly 5x10-foot painting depicts a Cinemascope landscape. Bushy trees on a crag jut above a cataract leading into a distance so deep it enfolds a verdant mountain range and snowcapped peaks that must be 50 miles away. Although there is some atmospheric blurring we see everything in sharp detailed focus right down to a microscopic group of religious figures fractions of inches tall. This close focus produces a woozy, magical space where distant things float forward and change everything in scale and substance. There are rivers of molten metal and marble clouds.

Von Humboldt had collected 6,000 varieties of plants on his trip, and Church seemed determined to paint them all, causing one observer to dub him “the Van Eyck of landscape.” There is a compulsive idealism about Church’s style that lends everything a hectic, clearer-than-life aura like a religious revelation.

Yes, he was a serious intellectual, but he was also a good Yankee showman, a trait that reveals itself in the painting’s altar-like forced-perspective frame. He was out to instruct and uplift his audience, but he was also out to wow them. It works. Even today visitors linger by the picture in reverence.

Church’s Greatest Hit was undoubtedly his famous 1857 “Niagara.” The big picture is not only a bracing metaphor of America’s might, it is a pictorial achievement that makes the viewer feel inside the picture, hovering above the great fall, feeling the spray of the ice-green water. When it was shown in London, the great Ruskin pronounced himself amazed.

In 1861 Church followed up with “The Icebergs.” It was a success then and is today regarded as his most original masterpiece. It was also, in a way, the swan song he sang on his way down hill.

What happened?

One enlightened view has it that a galaxy of coinciding events served to disillusion Church’s idealism. The trauma of the Civil War drained the country’s self-confidence, thus altering taste for art that expressed it. Church’s first two children died in infancy. And perhaps most crushing of all, Charles Darwin published “The Origin of the Species,” shattering Von Humboldt’s comforting view of nature and replacing its harmony with struggle and randomness.

All that makes perfect sense, but if you look at his art with today’s eyes an additional scenario unfolds.

Church’s glorious postcard sunsets identify him as a heartfelt romantic, as do his flair for the dramatic and his taste for exotic places.

By contrast his meticulous rendering bespeaks an exquisite and puritanical analytic bent. The two temperaments are in natural conflict when caged up inside one man. They need a binding ideal to resolve them, and one gets the feeling he found it in painting “The Icebergs.” The picture appears as the testament of a guy who has found his god. The looming iceberg looks like a solid, refracting and reflecting light through its magisterial mass, but it is in warm fact a liquid. Ice is a great metaphor of potential transformation. It suggests the metaphysical.

For the rest of his career Church seems to pursue a crystalline ideal that really wants solid matter to dissolve in pure light. When it doesn’t work, as in his view of the Parthenon, it just looks stiff.

In a way Church never made it work--as if he had made a perceptual breakthrough that simply could not be accounted for by art as it was constituted in his day.

In “The After Glow” he imposes Pop Art light rays on a realistic landscape. It’s downright wistful. “Morning in the Tropics” carries a sense of longing that might be mistaken for nostalgia for his jungle days. I think it has to do with the reflected light on the river. He knows it is this pure light he really wants to deal with, but there was just no way to do it then.

He comes closest in “Rainy Season in the Tropics,” in which he imposes a geometrical rainbow across the landscape. It really doesn’t look like a rainbow, rather a piece of clear plastic reflecting prismatic colors on its edges.

Artistically, Church looks like a painter who glimpsed the notion of contemporary Light and Space art seven decades before it could be made.

His recent revival may have something to do with that. In more obvious terms it has paralleled the growing conservatism of a country that liked Ronald Reagan because he made America feel good again, like in the old days when Church painted Niagara Falls.