Niagara Falls from the American Side

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Niagara Falls from the American Side: Frederic Edwin Church

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Art Type: Oil Painting
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Frederic Edwin Church Oil Painting - Niagara Falls from the American Side

Keywords: Niagara, American, Side

Work Overview: Niagara Falls, from the American Side
Artist Frederic Edwin Church
Year 1867
Medium oil on canvas
Dimensions 257 cm × 227 cm (101 in × 89 in)
Location Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland

Niagara Falls, from the American Side is a painting by the American artist Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900). Completed in 1867, and based on preliminary sketches made by the artist at Niagara Falls and on a sepia photograph, it is the third of a series of paintings Church made of this famous landmark. The painting is now in the collection of the Scottish National Gallery.[1] Church was a leading member of the Hudson River School of painters.

The painting depicts the view from the east side of Niagara Falls – the American side. In the spray of the waterfall a rainbow is visible. The painting has been described as giving the impression of the water being in constant motion, rushing down, roaring.

Church made his first painting of the falls in 1857. He had visited the falls several times in July and late August the previous year, making a number of pencil and oil sketches from different points of view. He elected to paint the scene from the Canadian side, choosing unconventional dimensions for the painting that emphasized the panoramic effect.[5]

The painting was an immediate success, attracting over 100,000 visitors within the first fortnight of its premiere at a New York gallery. Following this, it was exhibited at major cities on the Eastern seaboard, toured Britain twice and was selected for the 1867 Exposition Universelle in Paris. It was purchased by the recently founded Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1876, cementing that institution's success. When the Corcoran closed in 2014, its collection was gifted to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, where the painting can be seen today in the Corcoran gallery.[5]

The painting Niagara Falls, from the American Side was commissioned from Church by the American art dealer Michael Knoedler in 1866. It was the third painting of the series and may have been originally destined for the Exposition. The painting was purchased by John S. Kennedy in 1887, who gifted it to his homeland of Scotland.[1] Niagara Falls, from the American Side is the only major work by Frederic Edwin Church which is in a public collection in Europe.

The canvas is painted in the Romantic style and captures the aesthetic principles of the sublime and the picturesque.[7] Church was a member of the Hudson River School, a group of landscape artists, whose aesthetic vision was influenced by romanticism. The Romantic movement validated intense emotions. The movement was placing new emphasis on the sentiments of visionary and transcendental experience. Emotions like awe – especially that which is experienced in confronting the sublimity of untamed nature and its picturesque qualities – were now entirely new aesthetic categories, and very different from art styles of the same era – the unemotional Realism[8] and of the calm, balanced Classicism[9] – as a source of aesthetic experience.[10][11]

The Sublime view of nature was as something of a large scale dramatic subject, an expression of the sublime – defined by Edmund Burke as the strongest emotion that can be felt.

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Church's large canvas captures magnificently the drama of Niagara Falls, one of his country's most famous landmarks. This painting, based on a drawing Church made at Niagra in July 1856 and on a sepia photograph touched with colour, was commissioned by the New York art dealer Michael Knoedler in 1866. It may originally have been destined for the Universal Exhibition in Paris, as Church was selected to represent America there. It was bought in 1887 by John S. Kennedy who presented it to his native Scotland. It is the only major example of Church's work in a European public collection.

This is one of the most important American landscape paintings in any European public collection yet for almost a century its significance was overlooked and it languished out of sight. It was restored to view in 1980, reflecting a wider revival of British interest in American nineteenth-century landscape painting, and is now among the most popular works in the Scottish National Gallery.

Frederic Edwin Church was a pupil of Thomas Cole, the founder of the Hudson River School which was the first truly American school of painting. Described by his teacher as having ‘the finest eye for drawing in the world’, Church based his landscapes on studies and drawings made from nature on trips across North and South America. His finished paintings combine a feeling for scientific detail with impressive scale. Dramatically lit and theatrically presented, they caused a sensation when displayed to the public on both sides of the Atlantic.

Situated on the border between the United States and Canada, the Niagara Falls was an obvious subject for artists seeking to convey the physical power, scale and spectacular beauty of the American continent. Church visited the falls on several occasions and they appear in at least twenty of his paintings and studies. The only study for this vast picture is a small sepia photograph which the artist painted over in oils, perhaps when he visited the site in 1856. In his finished composition he eliminates walkways, fences, boats and any of the other signs of the tourist industry that were a familiar part of the popular Niagara Falls experience then as now. Instead he takes us to the very brink of the cataract; we look across to Goat Island and beyond to the famous horseshoe falls on the Canadian side. The small, rickety viewing platform at the left is the artist’s invention and the tiny figures (said to be his friend the sculptor Erastus Dow Palmer and the latter’s daughter Madeleine) serve to emphasise the overwhelming power of the cascading water.

This painting was originally commissioned by the New York dealer Michael Knoedler and was intended as one of the exhibits to represent the newly United States of America at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1867. The choice of this symbolic national landmark would have carried political as well as artistic significance, projecting an image of unbridled power and self-confidence to the wider world in the aftermath of the American Civil War. In the end, Church sent an earlier view of Niagara Falls to the Paris exhibition and our picture was shown in London where the crowds marvelled at the illusionistic rendering of light and the evocation of the sound and fury of the waterfalls. The painting was later purchased by John Stewart Kennedy, a Scottish-born businessman who had made his fortune in supplying coal and steel to the railroad industry and later as a banker in New York. Kennedy became a prominent philanthropist and it seems that he purchased this painting with the express purpose of gifting it to the Scottish people.

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