View on the Magdalena River (Primary Title)
Frederic Edwin Church, American, 1826 - 1900 (Artist)
This depiction of the pleasantly languid Magdalena River derives from Frederic Church’s 1853 expedition through present-day Colombia and Ecuador. Brimming with the meticulously rendered exotic flora and fauna that he viewed firsthand, View on the Magdalena River represents not one specific site but rather a composite of the rivers, grasslands, and mountainous terrain of South America. Along his journey, Church sketched his observations, including a simple adobe church in the Colombian town of Nare and the volcano Purace that the artist-explorer summited, combining them into this painting after returning to his New York City studio. When he exhibited the painting at the 1857 Annual Exhibition of the National Academy of Design, prominent art critic Clarence Cook remarked that it was “one of the freshest, and sweetest, and most seducing pictures of the exhibition.”
A Wilder Image Bright: Hudson River School Paintings from the Manoogian Collection
Vero Beach Museum of Art, January 31—March 28, 2004
American Paintings from the Manoogian Collection
National Gallery of Art, Washington, June 4—September 4, 1989
Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, September 23—November 26, 1989
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, December 18, 1989—February 25, 1990
Detroit Institute of Arts, March 27—May 27, 1990
Annual Exhibition
National Academy of Design, 1857.
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