Frederic Church in Vermont

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This exhibit brings together for the first time more than forty graphite drawings, oil sketches, and finished paintings by Frederic Church created during or as a result of his visits to Vermont over thirty years.

a painting of Otter Creek in Middlebury, Vermont, by Frederic Edwin Church
Frederic Edwin Church (American, 1826–1900), Otter Creek, Middlebury, Vermont, 1854, oil on canvas, 16 ⅛ x 24 ⅛ inches. Collection of Middlebury College Museum of Art, Vermont. Gift of Louis Bacon, Class of 1979, 2002.028.

These works help to establish this long-overlooked aspect of his career as a crucial period in his development from aspiring student to a fully mature artist with a style and bravura that would in succeeding years enable him to become the most important American landscape painter of the nineteenth century.

1848 was a transformative year for Church, who for the previous two years was the sole student of Thomas Cole, the preeminent American landscape painter of his time. In February of that year, Cole died at the age of forty-seven, leaving Church without a mentor but with an excellent foundation to pursue a professional career.

oil painting showing a covered bridge across a river with mountains in the background
Frederic Edwin Church (American, 1826–1900), On Otter Creek, 1850, oil on canvas, 18 x 24 ¾ inches. Yale University Art Gallery. Gift of Adam R. Rose, Class of 1981, and Peter R. McQuillan, 2023.80.2.

In May 1848, Church turned twenty-two and was left to decide for himself how best to develop his artistic skills further. Based on Cole’s own pattern of summer trips to New Hampshire, Maine, and elsewhere to create plein air sketches in graphite and oil that would later provide the inspiration for large-scale paintings created in his studio during the winter months, Church had a well-tested model for his own explorations.

That July, Church travelled to Vermont where he spent the next three months traversing the central part of the State and recording his own drawings and oil sketches. This would be the first of numerous trips that the artist made to Vermont, and his visits in 1848 and 1849, in particular, enabled him to further record those elements of the landscape that became part of his repertoire over the next few years and beyond.

The works assembled for this exhibit have come from numerous public and private collections including Olana, Church’s home and studio in Hudson, New York; the Yale University Art Gallery; the Newark Museum; Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum; The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College; and the Lyman Allyn Art Museum.

This exhibition is made possible through generous support from the Charles F. Kireker III and Sarah Kireker Faulkner ’79 Fund.