Niagara: A History of the Falls (15 page)

Or did it? Those who stand beneath it today in the Corcoran Gallery in Washington and stare long enough into the green depths of the water Church created – real water, boiling, coursing, sparkling, churning, skipping in runnels over the ragged ledges in the foreground, bubbling in eddies at the viewer’s feet, foaming in one triumphant splurge over the stark lip of the Escarpment, tumbling whitely on the far edge of the horseshoe, may be pardoned if they sense and even
see
the movement. That, after all, was Frederic Church’s genius.

3
Mr. Church’s masterpiece

When Church made his first sketching trip to the Falls in late March 1856, he was in his thirtieth year, tall, handsome, and boyish looking. A talented landscapist, he was facing what many of his contemporaries believed to be an impossible task. Even his mentor, Thomas Cole, then the outstanding landscape painter in North America, had tried and failed to capture either the reality or the essence of the prodigious cataract.

Frankenstein had attempted it in a series of nearly one hundred paintings. Church’s bold purpose was to set down on a single canvas everything about the Falls – their raging spirit, their geological significance, their very soul – and to do it with such meticulous accuracy that every curl of foam, every droplet of spray, every slippery rock, and every racing rivulet would seem even more realistic than the stereoscopic views that the new art of photography was making available in the homes of the continent.

Church was a sixth-generation Connecticut Yankee, the son of a well-to-do Hartford businessman who somewhat grudgingly allowed him to follow his natural bent for drawing. He was Cole’s only pupil, a member of the Hudson River school of landscape painting, which Cole had helped found. To these high-minded artists, roaming the New York and New England countryside and wandering farther and farther afield in search of subject matter, landscape painting had a loftier purpose than the mere depiction of outdoor views. It must seek to unveil the hidden spirituality in nature, “to speak a language strong, moral and imaginative.”

The American landscapists did not see nature as pictorially passive, like the Alps, but kinetic, wild, vital, imbued with energy and power, like the Falls – like America itself. No crumbling ruins for them, no decaying trees; their purpose was to paint life, not death. Alexander von Humboldt, the great geographer-meteorologist, himself a major influence on Church, had charged the landscape artists to paint the heroic, and it was heroic art that expansionist America craved. “Niagara Falls, the mighty portal of the Golden West,” in Cole’s colourful description, stood as the new symbol of Manifest Destiny. In that phrase, scarcely a decade old, was bound up all America’s yearnings, her faith in the future, her unbounded optimism, her unswerving belief in herself. This was the credo that Church himself espoused as a landscape artist.

He was very much a product of his time, a time when science, nature, and religion were, for many, inextricably bound together. Nature was a mirror to reflect God’s image, science a method to reveal God’s truth. Church, “a Nineteenth Century type of the Puritan,” to quote Charles Dudley Warner’s unfinished biography, believed in the moral purpose of landscape painting. He would certainly have agreed with his contemporary Samuel Osgood that landscape painting was “a Godlike calling,” and with the cleric E.L. Magoon that Niagara Falls was “the most magnificent leaf in the ‘mystic volume’ in the Book of Nature.”

Church himself was an amateur scientist with a wide-ranging knowledge of botany, zoology, meteorology, geology, and geography. He collected rocks and butterflies and devoured accounts of recent scientific expeditions. Humboldt’s influential
Kosmos
, a description of the physical universe, inspired Church to follow in the geographer’s footsteps through South America to paint mountains, volcanoes, gorges, and waterfalls – heroic landscapes that suggested nature in its rawest and most original manifestations.

But it was John Ruskin who set him on the great adventure of his life – Ruskin who wrote that to paint water was “like trying to paint a soul.” For the great English critic, whose influence on American painting was profound, the highest form of art was landscape painting, and the greatest landscape painter of all was J.M.W. Turner, whose ability to paint water realistically was, Ruskin felt, unexcelled. In Ruskin’s view, realism in landscape painting was the only “truth” – the link between art, nature, and God. “It will be the duty – the imperative duty – of the landscape painter to descend to the lowest details with undiminished attention,” he wrote. “Every class of rock, every kind of earth, every form of cloud, must be studied with equal industry, and rendered with equal precision.”

In praising Turner as “the only painter who had ever represented the surface of calm or the
force
of agitated water” Ruskin plunged into an animated discussion of water in motion that clearly had a profound effect on Church. The critic wrote especially of the gravitational forces that changed the form and character of moving water, changed the very look of it, depending on the speed with which it was moving, the obstacles along its route, and the comparative shallowness or depth of the stream bed. Thus did Ruskin link art with science, a marriage that certainly appealed to Church. He had scarcely finished reading the early volumes of Ruskin’s
Modern Painters
before he set off for Niagara. He didn’t even wait for the snow to melt.

In his three expeditions to the Falls in 1856, Church examined everything paintable. He had followed and experimented with the new science of photography; his own camera-like vision astonished his contemporaries. One pupil wrote that “his vision and retention of even the most transitory facts of nature passing before him must have been at the maximum of which the human mind is capable.… His mind seemed a camera obscura in which everything that passed before it was recorded permanently.… The primrose on the river’s brim he saw with a vision as clear as that of a photographic lens.…”

Unlike many others, Church was not content to depict the Falls from one or two vantage points. He painted it from above and below, from upstream and down, from near and far – as Frankenstein had. But he went farther than Frankenstein, for his interests were also scientific. He studied the anatomy of the river, painted forms of falling water, made drawings of rock formations, investigated the play of light on tumbling rapids, examined the shallows, peered over the brink, drew the curly waves created by the turbulence of the racing stream, the blasts of spray at the foot of Goat Island, and the abstract lines of foam on the lip of the Horseshoe. He studied the hydraulics of the cataract and the sculptural look of the cliffs. His drawings ran the gamut from the parabolic suspension bridge to the forms and colour of various trees and individual flowers. Much of his work was rough – a few pencil scrawls and some scribbled notations – a form of artist’s shorthand, his personal method of committing the Falls to memory. In October he was ready at last to return to his home on the Hudson River to begin work on his masterpiece.

His most important decision was to settle on a point of view for his work. His solution was revolutionary and breathtaking. Most previous artists had painted the Falls head on and from a considerable distance, so that the entire sweep of the two cataracts with Goat Island dividing them filled the canvas. But Church decided to place the viewer on the very brink of the western edge of the Horseshoe and to concentrate solely on the sweep of its great bend. No barrier, psychological or real, would stand between the viewer and the canvas. Against all tradition he included no foreground, no graceful framework of foliage, no clutch of awed sightseers to give the painting scale. It was as if the viewer were actually standing ankle-deep in the shallows overlooking the brink. Modern photography has rendered Church’s vision almost commonplace, but in its day, this point of view was a revelation.

The picture is almost entirely taken up with water and sky, the western lip of the Horseshoe sweeping diagonally across the canvas from left to right, then reversing itself to form a horizontal line of white foam slightly above the centreline of the painting. The only evidence of human incursion is the tiny Terrapin Tower in the distance and, on the far American shore, one or two dots that might be people. The sky above glowers and frowns, split by a single ray of white light knifing through the clouds to link up with the broken rainbow that arches over the crescent. In Church’s view, the foaming water was a symbol of God’s implacable wrath, the rainbow of his everlasting love.

The painting was not an accurate representation of the Falls but a kind of Platonic ideal. There was no point on that crumbling bank from which Church’s view could be exactly duplicated. Yet he had managed not only to catch the power and energy of the cataract but he had also, in Ruskin’s phrase, painted its soul. Everything about the picture was a revelation: he had made the water seem so real, so luminous, so alive that one critic would refer to it as “Niagara with the roar left out.” He had for the first time captured the elusive green of the tumbling water, which Dickens and others had admired. And he had abandoned the conventional squarish frame in favour of a wider canvas, 7½ feet by 3 feet, thus emphasizing the boundless, untrammelled geography of the continent.

The picture went on display in New York on May 1, 1857, at the Free Fine Art Gallery on Broadway. It had been bought directly from the painter by a respected New York firm of art dealers, Williams, Stevens, Williams, for forty-five hundred dollars – an unheard-of sum for an American canvas at that time. Of this sum, two thousand dollars was for reproduction rights. The firm also agreed to pay Church half of all future profits above the original twenty-five hundred dollars when the painting was sold. Artist’s proofs went on sale for thirty dollars apiece, regular prints for fifteen dollars. To reserve these in advance, some eleven hundred people signed the subscription book.

From the outset the response was ecstatic. The
Home Journal
dispatched “one of the most charming and cultivated women” it knew to a preview. She admitted that she had dreaded the visit, but within five minutes she had completely surrendered herself to Church’s composition. “It was there before me, the eighth wonder of the world!” she enthused. “The brown jagged verge above the western section of the Horseshoe
was at my feet.…”

The plaudits poured in. To the
Albion
, the painting was “uncontestably the finest oil picture ever painted on this side of the Atlantic.” The
New York Times
called it “the marvel of the western world.” Others were equally enraptured: Church’s painting was a triumph of colour and form; it was epoch making; it heralded a new era in American landscape painting; it rivalled, nay, it surpassed Turner; it wasn’t just a picture of the Falls, it
was
the Falls. Several onlookers tried to describe it in words and failed, just as in a previous century travellers to Niagara had declared the impossibility of putting the subject into words.

Throughout May, Church’s
The Great Fall, Niagara
was the rage. Almost every prominent New Yorker, from Horace Greeley to Charles A. Dana to George Bancroft, had been to see it. In one two-week period, 100,000 people lined up to view the picture. The average time given over to its contemplation was estimated at one hour.

After only a month, the painting was spirited off across the Atlantic, partly because its owners wanted to have it chromolithed for sale to the public and also because they hoped for the European stamp of approval. That came from the one critic who could make or break an artist – Turner’s champion, John Ruskin.

The manner of that approval went into legend. Ruskin, on carefully examining the painting, could not believe that Church’s rendering of the elusive rainbow was not enhanced by a trick of light from a nearby window; it
couldn’t
be mere paint. He raised his hand in front of the picture, expecting to see his fingers in the colour spectrum produced by refracted light coming through the glass. Only when the rainbow remained as Church had painted it did Ruskin realize what the artist had achieved. He told a reporter that he had found effects in the painting that he had waited for years to discover.

The London press agreed. The grey and forbidding
Times
applied its own seal of approval to the work by announcing that “the characteristic merit of this picture is its sober truth.” The
London Art Journal
echoed those words by declaring “it is truth, obviously and certainly … a production of rare merit … an achievement of the highest order.” Church’s realistic rendering of water, the “foam, flash, rush, dark depth, turbidity, clearness, curling, lashing, shattering,” amazed the critics. All agreed that with Church, American painting had come of age.

That, of course, was what Americans wanted to hear. A writer for
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper
had predicted that the work would “startle those ‘croakers’ across the water into a recognition of American genius.” In the march toward Manifest Destiny, Frederic Church was now one of the standard-bearers.

The painting toured the English provinces, drawing applause wherever it was shown. It returned to New York in the fall of 1858 to even greater approval. In the words of the
Cosmopolitan Art Journal
, it was now seen as “the finest painting ever painted by an American artist.” Meanwhile, Church, travelling through South America in Humboldt’s wake, produced another blockbuster,
The Heart of the Andes
, which was also universally acclaimed. He returned to Niagara to do more paintings and was undoubtedly gratified when, in 1876, a prominent banker, William W. Corcoran, bought
Niagara
at auction and hung it permanently in the Washington gallery that bears his name. The price was $12,500 – the largest ever paid for an American canvas to that time.