Existing comment:
Frederic Edwin Church
Botanical Sketches
May 1857
Botanical Sketches from Colombia: Bamboo Trees, Trunks and details
July 1853
A Group of Thirteen Botanical Studies from Colombia or Ecuador
1853
all pencil on paper
Church used his drawings from both trips to South America when he composed Heart of the Andes (1859), his greatest painted homage to Humboldt. Many of the specific plants in Church's sketches also appear in the painting, and several are also mentioned in Humboldt's Naturgemälde, on view to the left. Humboldt advised landscape painters that colored sketches, taken directly from nature, are the only means by which the artist, on his return, may reproduce the character of distant regions in the more elaborately finished pictures; and this object will be the more fully attained where the painter has, at the same time, drawn or painted directly from nature a large number of separate studies of the foliage of trees; of leafy, flowering, or fruit-bearing stems; of prostrate trunks, overgrown with Pothos and Orchideae.
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, Gift of Louis P. Church, 1917-4-85, -879, -835a |