Shop art print and framed art Chutes du Niagara by Frederic Edwin Church

Niagara is an oil painting on canvas produced in 1857 by the American artist Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900). The artist's most important painting, it confirmed his reputation as the best American landscape painter of the period. In his history of Niagara Falls, Pierre Berton writes: "Of the hundreds of paintings done of Niagara, before Church and after him, this is, by common consent, the best." Niagara Falls were painted regularly, being such an attraction to landscape painters that, according to John Howat, they were "the most popular, the most frequently treated and the most commonplace subject in European and American landscape painting of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries". What's more, the public was captivated by the natural wonder of the Falls, considered a landmark of the North American landscape and a major tourist destination. It was the "honeymoon capital of the world", and engravings of Niagara were given as wedding gifts. In the 1850s, Niagara was the subject of millions of stereographs, and its image found its way onto wallpaper, porcelain and lampshades, among other consumer items. In 1853, a mobile 487 m panorama of Niagara Falls was exhibited in New York. For Americans, the Falls symbolise the grandeur and expansionism of the United States. David C. Huntington, whose writings on Church in the 1960s rekindled interest in the painter, explained how Americans, in an age of spiritual optimism and "Manifest Destiny", would have perceived such a vivid [...]

 

This artwork is a painting from the classical period. It belongs to the romanticism style.

 

« Chutes du Niagara » is kept at Corcoran Collection - National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, United States.

 

Find the full description of Chutes du Niagara by Frederic Edwin Church on Wikipedia.