Oil Sketches – Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900)

Frederic Edwin Church
Study for Apotheosis to Thomas Cole
ca. 1847
oil on paper
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

"Frederic Edwin Church was perhaps the best-known representative of the Hudson River School of landscape painting as well as one of its most traveled.  Born in Hartford in 1826, he was the privileged son of Joseph Church, a jeweler and banker of that city, who interceded with Connecticut scion and collector Daniel Wadsworth to persuade the landscape painter Thomas Cole to accept his son as a pupil.  From 1844 to 1846 Church studied with Cole in his Catskill, New York studio and accompanied him on sketching sojourns in the Catskill Mountains and the Berkshires of Massachusetts.  At one point, the master characterized the student as having "the finest eye for drawing in the world."  Following his term with Cole, Church established a studio in New York City and quickly seized a reputation, less for the allegorical landscapes that had distinguished Cole's output, than for expansive New York and New England views that synthesized sketches of varying locales into vivid compositions."

– from an essay by Kevin J. Avery on the Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History at the Metropolitan Museum

Frederic Edwin Church
Cloud Study
ca. 1860-70
oil on cardboard
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Frederic Edwin Church
Woodland Study
1865
oil on cardboard
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Frederic Edwin Church
Moonlight, Church's Farm
ca. 1865
oil on cardboard
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Frederic Edwin Church
Alpine Lake
1868
oil on cardboard
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Frederic Edwin Church
Imaginary South American Landscape
ca. 1853-55
oil on paper
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Frederic Edwin Church
Botanical Study
ca. 1865-66
oil on cardboard
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Frederic Edwin Church
Pitajaya Fruit, Colombia
1853
oil on cardboard
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Frederic Edwin Church
Palm Trees, Jamaica
1865
oil on cardboard
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Frederic Edwin Church
Butterfly over Water
ca. 1865
oil on cardboard
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Frederic Edwin Church
Parthenon at Night
1869
oil on cardboard
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Frederic Edwin Church
Broken Column of the Parthenon
1869
oil on cardboard
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Frederic Edwin Church
Classical Ruins, Syria
1868
oil on cardboard
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Frederic Edwin Church
Sculpture in the Theater of Dionysus, Athens
1869
oil on cardboard
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Nineteenth-Century European Drawings

Adolph Menzel
Weeping Man
ca. 1850-60
drawing
Art Institute of Chicago

                     Binsey Poplars

                        felled 1879

My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,
Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,
All felled, felled, are all felled;
    Of a fresh and following folded rank
                   Not spared, not one
                   That dandled a sandalled
             Shadow that swam or sank
On meadow and river and wind-wandering
    weed-winding bank.

O if we but knew what we do
              When we delve or hew –
    Hack and rack the growing green!
               Since country is so tender
    To touch, her being so slender,
    That, like this sleek and seeing ball
    But a prick will make no eye at all,
    Where we, even where we mean
                     To mend her we end her,
                When we hew or delve:
After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.
    Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve
        Strokes of havoc unselve
                 The sweet especial scene,
        Rural scene, a rural scene,
        Sweet especial rural scene.

– Gerard Manley Hopkins

Pietro Fancelli
Antique Head of Meleager
before 1850
drawing
Minneapolis Institute of Art

Edward Burne-Jones
Head of a Woman
ca. 1873-77
drawing
Art Institute of Chicago

Edward Burne-Jones
Head of a Woman, Draped
ca. 1873-77
drawing
Art Institute of Chicago

Edward Burne-Jones
Head of a Young Woman
ca. 1873-77
drawing
Art Institute of Chicago

Edward Burne-Jones
Heads of Medusa
(studies for The Rondanini Medusa)
ca. 1873-77
drawing
Art Institute of Chicago

Henri Fantin-Latour
Self-Portrait
1857
drawing
Art Institute of Chicago

Gustave Courbet
Model Reading in the Studio
ca. 1849
drawing
Art Institute of Chicago

Paul Cézanne after Pierre Puget
Hercules Resting (sculpture)
1897
drawing
Art Institute of Chicago

Edward Burne-Jones
Figure Study (half-length)
1885
drawing
Art Institute of Chicago

Edward Burne-Jones
Draped Male Figure
ca. 1873-77
drawing
Art Institute of Chicago

Edward Burne-Jones
Figure Study
ca. 1873-77
drawing
Art Institute of Chicago

Edward Lear
Cedars of Lebanon
1858
drawing, with watercolor
Art Institute of Chicago

Mauro Berti
Design for Stage Set
before 1842
drawing
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Photographic Prints in Museums (1843-2015)

Berenice Abbott
The Wing
1946
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

Lewis Carroll
Margaret Frances Langton Clarke
1864
albumen print
Art Institute of Chicago

William Eggleston
Near Jackson, Mississippi
ca. 1970
dye imbibition print
Art Institute of Chicago

Arnold Newman
Violins, Philadelphia
1941
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

Thirteen Aphorisms on the Nature of Evil

1.

The unconscious hand of Evil loves its own innocence.

2.

Evil lives for the existence of "the other"; for itself it prefers a familiar, common existence.

3.

Evil always owns its own orchard, and sits there gaily picking cherries.

4.

Evil loves the shape of the human hand, formed like its own; for that sublimely simple tool is capable of carrying out the most monstrously delicate atrocities.

5.

In antiquity, Time begot Chaos. But from Chaos, surely, there arose Evil: for in Chaos there is ambiguity – and Darkness and Night – the home of human regret.

6.

Temptation is made flesh by the love it borrows from the heart.

7.

The will must challenge temptation as memory challenges oblivion.

8.

The brave make a place at their table for Evil. For only first-hand knowledge of evil can transform meditation into action.

9.

Evil is always waiting for opportunity's welcome: thriving as it does on the dark of judgment's eclipse.

10.

Time must tolerate the shape of Evil as it tolerates all other miracles.

11.

Evil loves its house, which it shares with history, which is blind.

12.

One must never forget that history does not exist. Rather, only consciousness, which makes an imaginary house for time past.

13.

And consciousness is the only sword which makes Evil tremble.

– Ellen Hinsey (The White Fire of Time, Wesleyan University Press, 2002)

Richard Nickel
Untitled (Auditorium Building, Street Level)
ca. 1953-55
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

Eliot Porter
Sycamore Tree, Michigan
1973
dye imbibition print
Art Institute of Chicago

Art Shay
Nelson Algren pauses after another White Sox loss
1950
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

Arthur Siegel
Italy
1953
C-print
Art Institute of Chicago

Charles Soulier
Paris Fire (The Grand Staircase Entrance)
1871
albumen print
Art Institute of Chicago

Thomas Struth
Study, Charité, Berlin
2015
inkjet print
Art Institute of Chicago

William Henry Fox Talbot
Plaster Cast of Marble Bust of Patroclus in the British Museum
1843
salted paper print
Art Institute of Chicago

Willard van Dyke
Ventilators
ca. 1933
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

Willard van Dyke
Ventilators
ca. 1933
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

Carleton Watkins
San Francisco Bay (Fort Point)
1860s
albumen print
Art Institute of Chicago

Minor White
Patched Window
1959
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

Camera Views (1852-2002)

Maxime Du Camp
Plate 106 from album - Egypte, Nubie, Palestine et Syrie
published 1852
salted paper print
Art Institute of Chicago

Auguste Salzmann
Jerusalem, Valley of Josaphat, Tomb of St James
1854
salted paper print
Art Institute of Chicago

Harry Callahan
Chicago
1950
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

Brassaï
Fenêtre - Style Colonial à Ouro Preto (Brésil)
1959
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

Duane Michals
Office
1964
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

Benjamin Pantier

Together in this grave lie Benjamin Pantier, attorney at law,
And Nig, his dog, constant companion, solace and friend.
Down the gray road, friends, children, men and women,
Passing one by one out of life, left me till I was alone
With Nig for partner, bed-fellow, comrade in drink.
In the morning of life I knew aspiration and saw glory.
Then she, who survives me, snared my soul
With a snare which bled me to death,
Till I, once strong of will, lay broken, indifferent,
Living with Nig in a room back of a dingy office.
Under my jaw-bone is snuggled the bony nose of Nig –
Our story is lost in silence. Go by, mad world!

– Edgar Lee Masters (1915)

Joel Snyder
Burr Oak, Lisle, Illinois
1971
platinum print
Art Institute of Chicago

Joel Meyerowitz
Hartwig House, Truro, Cape Cod
1976
C-print
Art Institute of Chicago

Bob Thall
Vicinity of Federal Street and Van Buren Street, view north
1978
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

Flying Deeper into the Century

Flying deeper into the century
is exhilarating, the faces of loved ones eaten out
slowly, the panhandles of flesh warding off
the air, the smiling plots. We are lucky to be mature,
in our prime, seeing more treaties, watching
TV get computerized. Death has no dominion.
It lives off the land. The glow over the hill, from
the test sites, at night, the whole block of neighbours
dying of cancer over the next thirty years. We are
suing the government for a drop of blood; flying deeper
into the century, love,
the lies are old lies with more imagination;
the future is a canoe. The three bears are ravenous, not content
with porridge. Flying deeper into the century,
my hands are prayers, hooks, streamers.
I cannot love grass, cameos or lungs.
The end of the century is a bedspread up to the eyes.
I want to be there, making ends meet.
I will not love you, with such malice at large.
Flying deeper into the century is beautiful, like
coming up for the third time, life flashing before us.
The major publishing event is the last poem of
all time. I am a lonely bastard. My brothers and sisters have
had sexual relations, and I am left with their mongrel sons
writing memoirs about the dead in Cambodia.
Flying deeper, I do not remember what I cared for, out
of respect. Oh Time, oh Newsweek, oh Ladies' Home Journal,
oh the last frontier, I am deeply touched.
The sun, an ignoramus, comes up.
I have this conversation with it. Glumly, glumly, deeper
I fly into the century, every feather of each wing
absolution, if only I were less than human, not angry
like a beaten thing.

– Pier Giorgio Di Cicco (1982)

Don A. DuBroff
Notre Dame Church, Chicago
1983
C-print
Art Institute of Chicago

Joel Sternfeld
The Claudian Aqueduct, Rome
1989
C-print
Art Institute of Chicago

Thomas Struth
Jianghan Lu, Wuhan
1995
C-print
Art Institute of Chicago

Terry Evans
Abandoned Farm, Central North Dakota
1997
C-print
Art Institute of Chicago

Jeff Wall
The Flooded Grave
1998-2000
transparency in lightbox
Art Institute of Chicago

Wolfgang Tillmans
Faltenwurf, Bourne Estate
2002
C-print
Art Institute of Chicago