Documents Project #3
Project
Title: Frederick Church and "Niagara"
Document:
Click on the picture above for a larger view.
Source:
Frederick Edwin Church,
"Niagara," 1857, 42½ inches high by 90½ inches wide, oil
paint on canvas, currently at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington,
DC
Background:
American artists
of the 19th Century traveled, at first, to the wilderness of the
Catskill Mountains and the Adirondack Mountains of New York State
looking for good locations to turn into landscape paintings.
Often their
paintings served as advertisements for these locations and these sites
quickly became tourist destinations. This is certainly true of
Niagara Falls. Between 1850 and 1875, about 50,000 tourists a
year visited the Falls. (See the web site of the exhibit: "Frederic Church, Winslow Homer, and Thomas
Moran: Tourism and the American Landscape" at the Cooper-Hewitt
National Design Museum, New York, NY at http://ndm.si.edu/EXHIBITIONS/tourism_in_america/index.asp.
Click on "Visit the Website" and choose Niagara Falls on the
map.)
Document:
Click on the picture above for a larger view.
Questions:
- Niagara Falls certainly is a spectacular sight. Why do you think Frederick Church choose the Falls as a subject?
- Church made many sketches of the Falls on location and took them back to his studio where he painted the picture shown above. While he was visiting the Falls, there must have been tourists climbing all over the place. Why don't any people appear in the final painting?
- This painting is almost 8 feet wide. Why did the artist make such a large painting?
- There is no foreground in this painting. It seems like you, the viewer, are standing in the water right near the edge of the Falls. Why do you think the artist created this view?
- Do you think Church embellished what the Falls really look like? Why or why not?