File:Frederic Edwin Church - A Tropical Moonlight.jpg

Identifier: americanpainters00shel (find matches)
Title: American painters: with eighty-three examples of their work engraved on wood
Year: 1879 (1870s)
Authors: Sheldon, George William, 1843-1914
Subjects: Painters Painting, American
Publisher: New York : D. Appleton and company
Contributing Library: University of California Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: Internet Archive

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y necessarilyexcludes the mention of a multitude of names which lend lustre to the historyof contemporaneous art on the western side of the Atlantic; and the few whichappear in these pages must serve as representatives of the rest. Perhaps the pleasantest feature of the recent sale of Mr. John Taylor John-stons collection of paintings was the fact that in competition with Meissonier,Turner, Decamps, Delacroix, Delaroche, Jules Breton, Gerorne, Horace Yernet,Diaz, Corot, Zaniacois, Troy on, Vibert, Ilamon, Boldini, Schreyer, Fortuny,Daubigny, and a score of other foremost modern masters, the first prize wascarried off by an American artist. The largest sum bid for any single workwas twelve thousand five hundred dollars for Frederick Edwin ChurchsNiagara Falls, and that, too, in a city where buyers of pictures are generallysupposed f subscribe to a creed the first and front article of which is, Ibelieve in the transcendent excellence <»f Parisian art. Asked, on one occasion,
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A TROPICAL MOONLIGHT.From a Painting by Frederick Edwin Church. p. 10. FREDERICK EDWIN CHURCH. \\ what were his methods of work, and his views of the nature and the ends ofart, Mr. Church replied that he had always been a faithful student of Nature,and that this was the only answer he could give to such questions. So far,indeed, as methods of work were concerned, he had never looked upon himselfas having any; and the question put to him with reference to them had sug-gested the matter to him for the first time. Mr. Churchs pictures, however,speak for him more satisfactorily than he can speak for himself. In the firstplace, they tell us that, like Sir Joshua Reynolds, he sees little beauty in com-mon things, and depends largely upon the external splendor of his subject.His instincts, in a word, are tropical; and in the gorgeousness and magnifi-cence of the tropics he has found the themes that please him best. Outsideof the tropics, his subjects are still gorgeous and magnificent—the

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