The Many Lives of Frederic Edwin Church

Benjamin Moser | Hyperallergic | 15th July 2026

Church was America’s first art star, a virtuoso of the Hudson River School of landscape painters. His reputation rested partly on landscapes painted in remote places like the Andes which carried “intimations of the sublime”. More memorably, though, he painted America, even as it struggled to shake off its “colonial origins”. His work told stories about parts of America many had never seen. Says his biographer, Church was “not just a great painter of America — he’s a great American painter”.