We wish to thank Dr. Gerald Carr for preparing the following catalogue note:

The present picture is a studio preparation by Church for a major studio canvas of his. The finished picture (dated 1873; The Brooklyn Museum), which he debuted at New York’s Century Association in June 1873, was at the time titled “Sunset in the Tropics” (fig. 1). Its owner was Robert Hoe, II (1815–84), a Manhattan printing press magnate, prior patron of Church’s, and fellow Centurion (as they called themselves). The full-size image was, in part, a pendant to an earlier, sizable Mediterranean canvas Hoe had owned since 1867, A Reminiscence of the Bay of Salerno (unlocated), by John F. Kensett (1816–72). By 1873, its creator having died the year before, Kensett’s oeuvre had acquired a post-facto patina of melancholy.

Landscape painters by nature (so to say) move around, and Hartford, Connecticut-born Mr. Church did so more than most. From the late 1840s into the 1860s he roamed large sectors of the Western Hemisphere. His proclivities and technical skills synchronized him. Outdoors his dexterities with pencils, pens, and paints—mostly oils, rarely watercolors—were among the best of his generation. Indoors he inclined toward wide-proportioned, detailed canvases unabashedly romantic in tone. His preponderant studio themes were New England semi-settlements and wildernesses, northeastern U.S. sunsets and sunrises, lagoons and mountains of Colombia and Ecuador, Niagara Falls, the Canadian sub-Arctic, and inland and coastal Jamaica.

In early 1860, Church bought agrarian property on the hilly east side of the Hudson River, opposite the town of Catskill and the farm property where his teacher, Thomas Cole (1801-48) had, from the mid-1830s, resided. A decade and a half previously, as Cole’s teen-aged pupil at Catskill, Church had developed lifelong affection for that region. Starting in November 1867, and accompanied by family members, Church voyaged the Atlantic, tilting his own oeuvre toward Mediterranean themes and Old Master tonalities. Returning to the U.S. in June 1869, he soon began building, furnishing, and decorating his Orientalizing upstate New York mansion, of which he was the principal designer. By late 1872 the new domicile was ready for occupancy.

At that rate, the years 1872 and 1873 should have been resilient for Mr. Church. During those two years, he and/or their owners exhibited three of his recent, major Mediterranean-theme pictures, three smaller Tropical canvases (including the Brooklyn painting), a small twilit Italian castellar ruin, and a largish, sonorous Maine coastal drama from 1863. But complications swirled. In November 1871, he accepted a pro bono nomination to the New York City Parks Commission. Journalists throughout the country welcomed the choice. But when slated for routine renewal a year and a half later, Church’s Parks continuance was opposed by Manhattan Aldermen—one in particular—who objected that he was no longer a New York City denizen. Rather than quarrel, he then quit. At that juncture, May 1873, several Manhattan newspapers excoriated Church’s Tammany Hall detractors. Which censures, however, didn’t prevent their dismissing a colleague they also deemed an outsider the following year, 1874, and, eventually, in early 1878, firing Hartford, Conn.-born Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903), Central Park’s principal designer and a friend of Church’s. Excepting aspects of his first South American journey in 1853 and his stint with the Parks Commission, none of Church’s artistic inclinations or rewards came from government entities. For most of his maturity, he—understandably—avoided overtly associating with politicians and political causes.

At his easels during the 1870s, Church fostered recent Mediterranean prerogatives as he reprised repertory New World themes, with the exception of Niagara. Safe to say, the Tropics were his Western Hemisphere favorites. During the 1850s, he had ventured twice to South America, inspired both times by the travels, writings, and paradigm of Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859). A long-lived Prussian naturalist sometimes regarded as the world’s premier citizen, Humboldt had alighted in North America, too, at the turn of the century. But by the 1870s he was receding history. Memorialized in the U.S. and elsewhere during September 1869 on the centenary of his birth, Humboldt had, a decade earlier, died, in Germany, just short of age ninety. Hence from Humboldtian standpoints, too, Church’s later-life canvases of the Tropics are, aptly, wistful.

Intended for the artist and no one else, the present work is forthrightly sketchy. Church customarily outlined in pencil his outdoor as well as indoor oil studies before brushing them. Indoors he also, often, changed his mind while making clarifications. Here, for example, the large tree toward the right foreground is an unencumbered palm. But in the canvas, it’s proportionately bigger, vine-swathed and deciduous. And the bare, opposite-bank riverside ridge toward the left, is topped with a flourishing, church-towered village. Casual spectators of the day might have missed the canvas’s implied second artist’s signature, and especially its suggestion of Church’s own, newly-built, southerly Old World-style house atop its North American riverside perch. But Mr. Church himself, and his sensitive patron, Mr. Hoe, would, likely, have relished those personalized particulars.

One more thing. In the limited modern-day literature referring to it, the present work correctly has been linked with the Brooklyn canvas but usually mis-dated to the 1850s. Almost without exception (I would say), Church’s extant sketches of various kinds--including monochrome drawings--which look closely related to studio pictures by him, were prepared indoors shortly before or during his work on the larger images.