Image source: Wikimedia Commons (Public domain). View source
The Heart of the Andes
Frederic Edwin Church · Romanticism & Landscape
- Artist
- Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900)
- Date
- 1859
- Dimensions
- 168 x 302.9 cm
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Location
- Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, United States
The Heart of the Andes is an immense, imaginary panorama of the South American Andes, combining landscapes Frederic Church sketched on his travels in Ecuador and Colombia. Snow-capped peaks rise behind a valley of forests, rivers and waterfalls.
A closer look
Church packed the canvas with astonishingly detailed observations: tropical plants, birds, butterflies, a village with a white church and, almost hidden, two figures kneeling at a wayside cross. The scene moves from steamy jungle in the foreground to the icy summit of Chimborazo in the distance, illustrating the scientific idea, made popular by the explorer Alexander von Humboldt, that a single mountain contains every climate on earth.
History of the painting
After its sensational New York debut in 1859, The Heart of the Andes was sold to the collector William T. Blodgett for 10,000 dollars, at the time the highest price ever paid for a work by a living American artist. Church had planned to take it to Germany to show it to the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, whose writings had inspired his journeys to South America, but Humboldt died before the picture could reach him. In 1909 it was bequeathed to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
