Frederic Edwin Church’s lengthy love affair with the State of Maine is revealed in Maine Sublime: Frederic Edwin Church’s Landscapes of Mt. Desert and Mt. Katahdin, opening on June 30th at the Portland Museum of Art. 

As a painter, Church was a prolific, inexorable part of New York’s art scene—and dedicated to his life’s masterwork and longtime home, Olana, majestically situated on a promontory in the midst of the Empire State’s iconic Hudson River Valley. He was surrounded with sylvan wonder in New York, but the artist sought new horizons, his eventual forays into the seductive wilds of Maine’s inland and coastline ultimately setting him apart from so many of his contemporaries, further characterizing and distinguishing his work with increased depth and intensity. A series of 23 oil sketches from his assignations there will be on exhibit in Maine Sublime. artes fine arts magazine

The young artist had stolen his first glimpse of those sublime, northern charms while apprenticing for Hudson School mentor, Thomas Cole, between 1845 and 1847. Cole’s unorthodox, overland approach to Maine’s vistas and shoreline with fellow pilgrim, artist Henry Cheever Pratt, afforded them exotic scenes and perspectives for sketches to work from, once back in Catskill. In addition to sharing these fresh, sirenic images with the impressionable Church, including dramatic renderings of Mt. Desert and Mt. Katahdin, Cole encouraged his apprentice to idealize nature while reflecting on substantial themes in his work’s execution. The advice proved invaluable to his student, whose apprenticeship ended only two years before Cole’s premature death.

Church’s attendance at the 1849 Art-Union Exhibit in Germany was also pivotal to his painting choices, due in part to the influence of participating artists Andreas Achenbach and Bostonian Henry Fitz Lane, whose seascapes depicted turbulent, dramatic action and theatrical lighting. The ‘Dusseldorf manner’ had captured Church’s imagination when he then returned to the States, where New England transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau further aroused his contemporary with “The Maine Woods”, an account of his Mt. Katahdin ascent, a paean to ‘the sublime’ in that powerful setting.

Given these factors, it is no surprise that once Church traveled and sketched in Maine, his relationship with the area flourished for thirty years. The Portland exhibition will focus on the artist’s 23 small oil sketches produced after his visits to Mt. Desert and Mt. Katahdin, Maine’s two most majestic natural landmarks.

Maine Sublime was organized by Olana Traveling Exhibitions and curated by John Wilmerding, Sarofim Professor Emeritus of American Art and Chair of the Department of Art and Archeology at Princeton University. The show will run through September 30, 2012 at Portland Museum of Art, Seven Congress Square, Portland, ME.

By Kathy Arcano, Contributing Writer

Headline thumbnail: (detail) Fog off Mount Desert (1850), o/b. Private Collection, promised gift, national gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.