As a member of the second generation of Hudson River School painters, Church's work enacts a movement away from the symbolic unity of the first-generation painters such as Cole - in which each element of the landscape has a coded allegorical value - towards a purer emphasis on the natural scene.His oeuvre is synonymous with the confident, inquisitive, sometimes astonished gaze of the nineteenth century West upon the rest of the world, and pulsates with the energy of discovery. Whereas Cole's travels were restricted largely to the United States, Church's artistic tours took him to exotic and remote locations, from the Arctic Circle to the Middle East. If Thomas Cole's paintings made the Hudson River Valley famous, Frederic Edwin Church made the painters of the Hudson River Valley famous for painting the world.In this sense, his work is related to the subgenre of American Romantic landscape painting known as Luminism, though it lacks that style's emphasis on calm and stillness.
His work became renowned not only for its meticulous rendering of landscape, but for the equal attention it lavished on sunlight, moonlight, cloud, mist, and other intangible qualities of location. Frederic Edwin Church was one of the most gifted painters of light and air of the Romantic period.
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