Born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1826, Frederic Church was the leading figure of the second generation of the Hudson River School of painters, and by the 1850's and 60's he was America's most famous painter. There was a time when hundreds, maybe even thousands in the mid 1850's would line up around the block of Williams Stevens & Williams, his New York dealer, and pay 50 cents just to gaze at a single canvas. The paintings for which he became known were dramatic landscapes conveying a sense of the sublime, extraordinary moments in nature, when the interplay of light and space come together in a transcendent fashion without the guiding hand of man.  His career rise was meteor like, taking off  in his early twenties, but by the time he was forty (post Civil War), public taste changed away from the native school instead towards European art, and these aesthetic shifts in taste combined with his own health issues of rheumatoid arthritis caused his reputation to decline, especially when his arthritis flared in the winter months which would have been when the artists would meet with their patrons, past and prospective. Fortunately for Church he came from a wealthy family (his father was a founder/partner of an insurance company that eventually became Aetna Insurance) and received his first art instruction from Benjamin Coe. After Hartford neighbor Daniel Wadsworth noticed his precocious talents, Wadsworth wrote to Cole about the young artist and encouraged Cole to take Church on as a pupil. The four years spent with Cole formed a foundation that would last the rest of Church's professional career, as he lived with Cole and painted with him in Catskill, New York from 1844 to 1848.  Church was Cole's first and foremost student. However, his own style differed from Cole's in that it was not laden with romanticism and allegory because he believed that an artist should capture the realities of nature and focus on the relationship between light and form. On canvas this came down to Cole having an earlier style, a looser brushstroke, laden with emotion while Church was colder, more detached, with a much tighter control over the smaller brush.

By age 18, he made his debut at the National Academy of Design with the painting, "Hooker and Company journeying through the Wilderness" (1846, col. Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT) and was elected an Associate Member.  Around 1848-1849, about the time he exhibited the painting, "Haying near West Rock" (1849, col. New Britain Museum of Art, CT),  he became one of the youngest artists to be elected to the status of academician at the National Academy of Design, and he was soon training pupils of his own, including Jervis McEntee and William James Stillman. In the subsequent period, Church emulated Cole’s formula, painting large-scale landscapes of the Hudson River Valley, Vermont, Massachusetts, Maine and Virginia. Possibly influenced by the writings of English theorist John Ruskin (Church used some of the same frame designs as the English Pre-Raphaelites), he strove to paint in a more precise manner, focusing on specific effects of weather and atmosphere, with a particular emphasis on clouds. Church gradually began to take a more scientific approach to nature, using sketches he had created in the outdoors in the preparation of his canvases. He was also inspired by the writings of Alexander von Humboldt, a German naturalist-explorer, and in 1853, he became the first American artist to visit equatorial South America. Accompanying Cyrus Field, who later gained renown for his participation in the transatlantic cable project, Church followed Humboldt’s 1802 route from Colombia to Ecuador. Along the way, Church drew from nature, producing the drawings that became the basis for important canvases depicting exotic subjects such as "The Cordilleras: Sunrise" (1855; Private Collection).

When his works received high praise, Church set off on a second expedition in 1857. On this sojourn, he traveled to Ecuador with the landscape painter Louis Remy Mignot. It was on this trip that he was able to concentrate on the scenery of the Andes, and he filled diaries and sketchbooks with records of the vegetation and the countryside. Characterized by vast vistas and atmospheric detail, the works that resulted from this sojourn demonstrate Church’s unique approach. Among the great triumphs of the artist’s career was "Heart of the Andes" (1859; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), in which Church captured the essence of the tropics.

Another significant product of this period in the artist’s career was "Niagara" (1857; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC), which established Church as the leading interpreter of the American spirit. He also set up a studio in New York City, but during this period the Hudson River Valley came to have deep personal meaning, and he determined to make his home there. In New York City, his artistic home was the Tenth Street Studio (his famous canvas "Twilight in the Wilderness" (1860, col. Cleveland Museum of Art, OH) is based upon "Twilight, a Sketch" (1858) which he painted from the Tenth Street Studio looking west over Hoboken at sunset), while out in the country it was his home, a work in progress just south of Hudson, NY.  From 1864 into the 1890s, he frequently worked from his studio at the topmost part of his family farm near Hudson at Bee Craft Mountain from where he had a broad panoramic view that he often painted. His subject matter went far beyond the New York, New England, and South America, as he also traveled to the Arctic where he made sketches that eventually would culminate in his largest canvas ever known, "Icebergs of the North" (1861, col. Dallas Museum, TX). Then in 1867 he went to Europe and North Africa. By 1877, severe rheumatism crippled his right hand, occasionally he attempted to paint with his left hand, but his career was essentially hobbled except in the warmest of weather.  The last twenty years of his life, seemingly forgotten as an artist, he spent designing and redesigning various aspects of his home, Olana, his Moorish-style palace on the Hudson River and also traveled to Mexico (in the winter) and Maine (in the summer) where he painted the Mount Katahdin region. He died in 1900 in New York City.

While his larger works can be seen in various museums around the country, two museums have the bulk of his work, one is Olana, the State Historic Site near Hudson, NY, the home of the artist until his death, then in turn the home of his daughter in law until 1962 when a consortium of private fundraisers and public monies were spent to save the building, land and collection intact and undivided. They have upwards of 700 examples by the artist. The other museum with great depth of works by the artist is the Cooper Hewitt Museum, at 92nd and Fifth in New York City. According to the lecturers at Olana sometime around 1916, curators from that museum visited Frederic's son Louis at Olana, and expressed interest in his father's work. Louis said that was great, they were welcome to take the sketches in the attic, but he wanted to keep the paintings on the walls and downstairs. It is estimated that the Cooper Hewitt Museum has somewhere around 2,000 painted sketches by Frederic Edwin Church, and upon occasion they have been known to take them out of storage and share them with the museum going public.

Sources include:
Matthew Baigell, Dictionary of American Art
Michael David Zellman, 300 Years of American Art