Church was the first great American painter to make a point of snubbing Europe; he neither grew up nor trained there, and did not set foot in the Continent until his reputation was long established. Yet he continued to depend heavily on European pictorial conventions, above all that of the Romantic sublime. The sublime—a concept introduced by the first-century philosopher Longinus and later refined by Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant—rests on an encounter with something too immense or too powerful for the human mind to comprehend fully. With it comes an expectation that, as the mind cracks apart under the strain of trying, we might glimpse the transcendent. In landscape painting, the sublime had its origins in the high-angled, panoramic vistas (or “world landscapes”) of Joachim Patinir, Albrecht Altdorfer, and Pieter Bruegel the Elder. It was developed into a rhetoric by Salvator Rosa in the seventeenth century and by Caspar David Friedrich and Turner in the early nineteenth century.
In Church’s hands, the sublime served as an index to the vastness and complexity of nature, the greatness of God, and the “naturalness” of the new nation. But there was something belated about his adoption of this fundamentally European tradition. Compare Church’s landscapes with paintings by the French realists and Impressionists who were his contemporaries, and you become conscious of an assumed relationship between landscape, national identity, and religious revelation that had already begun to feel strained. The landscapes of Church and his peer Albert Bierstadt (who painted the American West) can feel like histrionic versions of Friedrich’s simpler, more concentrated aesthetic.
When Church did finally visit Europe, in the late eighteen-sixties, he was unimpressed. (“The Tiber is not the Hudson,” he wrote.) He was drawn instead to the Levant, and his travels to the Middle East, in 1868, inspired what many consider his last masterpiece—not a painting but Olana, a lovingly designed landscape and his home on a hill in the Hudson Valley. With its winding paths, extensive planting, and choreographed vistas offering views of four states, Olana is a sort of Gesamtkunstwerk to which Church devoted the final decades of his career. “I can make more and better landscapes in this way,” he wrote, “than by tampering with canvas and paint in the studio.”