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Frank Baron

From Alexander von Humboldt to Frederic Edwin Church:
Voyages of Scientific Exploration and Artistic Creativity

2. Frederic Edwin Church Retraces Humboldt’s Footsteps in the Andes

Understanding Humboldt’s equally remarkable influence on the artist Frederic Edwin Church presents unique challenges. In Church’s case, scientific, humanistic, and artistic aims merged. Although Church, too, owned a copy of the Personal Narrative,[1] this fact alone does not explain how Humboldt transformed Church’s life and signaled a new phase in the career of the artist. We need to examine at least a few other works in Church’s personal library to understand why and how Humboldt shaped the painter’s work.

The Personal Narrative covered Humboldt’s exploration of South America, primarily in Venezuela and Cuba, only to the point of his arrival in Colombia. Church, who retraced Humboldt’s travels, did so only after this point; he followed the path Humboldt had taken in Colombia, then in Ecuador, and finally in Mexico.

Even Cosmos and Aspects of Nature,[2] also in Church’s personal collection, contain only brief and widely scattered references to the areas the artist visited. Nevertheless, it is important to realize that Aspects of Nature contained a passage that was of special interest to the artist personally. Humboldt observed:

It would be an enterprise worthy of a great artist to study the aspect and character of all these vegetable groups, not merely to hothouses or in the descriptions of botanists, but in their native grandeur in the tropical zone. How interesting and instructive to the landscape painter would be a work which should present to the eye, first separately, and then in combination and contrast, the leading forms which have been here enumerated![3]

 Such a passage as this one made it clear that Humboldt’s guidance opened a new way of approaching art work. Church took this guidance seriously; one of Humboldt’s books in Church’s library provided specific geographical orientation. The crucial information for following Humboldt’s footsteps was in Heinrich Klencke’s biography of the German explorer. Church owned a copy of the volume.[4] Although much has been written about Humboldt’s influence on Church, the role of this book has been overlooked. The biography supplies details about the places of greatest interest, and it is instructive to review the narration of Humboldt’s travels through the countries that interested Church the most. The following passage of the biography describes Humboldt, along with Aimé Bonpland, exploring Colombia and Ecuador. The inserted italics in the text of Humboldt’s itinerary below show the points where Church sketched and painted during his two trips. The correspondences provide strong evidence that Church had information to retrace Humboldt’s most dramatic experiences.

. . . the treasures of science he had collected on the Orinoco stream encouraged him to undertake a similar trip on the Magdalen[a] stream, a river flowing through the beautiful and majestic valleys of New Granada, and entering the sea by several mouths not far from Carthagena. They took a boat, and went up the stream into the country as far as Honda, where Bonpland explored the rich botanical treasures of the shore, while Humboldt drew a chart of the river district, in spite of the torments of insects, climate, and dangerous localities. At Honda they landed, to proceed to the capital, St. Fe de Bogotá, on mules, almost the only traveling convenience on the continent of South America. They had been traveling on the river and in the valleys for thirty-five days, and remained in Bogotá till September, occupying themselves with botanical and geographical researches, and admiring and studying the magnificent natural formations of the rocks and waterfalls of Tequendama, the mines, and the picturesque remains of former earthquakes. On a dangerous path over the inconvenient pass of the Andes of Quind[ío], whose highest point is 11,500 English feet above the sea, they proceeded to Popay[á]n; in the rain, quite wet through, and barefoot on the soft soil, sleeping under the free heaven at night, and awaking exhausted in the morning, they passed through the Cauca valley, visited the snow-covered volcanoes, Pur[esé] and Sotara, through Pasto, a little town situated at the foot of a burning volcano, crossed the equator, and arrived at Quito on the 6th [of] January, 1802, after a journey of four months.

Here Humboldt soon recovered from the effects of the dangers and privations of the journey, in the highly agreeable and equable climate of this country, and he employed his stay of nearly nine months, in geological and botanical studies; his sense for natural beauty and cheerful landscapes finding abundant food for gratification in the enchanting situation of the place, opposite long ranges of gigantic snowy mountains. He ascended the crater of the volcano Pichincha, though not without trouble and several unsuccessful trials. On it, he made experiments on the electric, magnetic, and hydraulic properties of air, measured altitudes, and, indeed, studied the chain of the Andes, in a geognostic point of view, so fundamentally that his works became the most important materials for the foundation and prosecution of the study of modern geognosy. He wandered the majestic snowy tops of the Antisana, and of the Cotopaxi, the highest volcano of the Andes, whose thunders are often heard at a distance of 200 English miles, at Honda, on the river Magdalen[a]; he ascended Tunguragua with Bonpland and a young enthusiast for science, named Mont[úfa]r, who accompanied him on this journey, and on the 23rd [of] June, 1802, he [Humboldt] even ascended the Chimborazo, where he climbed to a height of 8036 toises, an elevation to which no man before Humboldt had ascended.[5]

On August 26, 1853, when he first crossed into Ecuador, Church found confirmation of the vision of spectacular scenery, which Humboldt’s observations had suggested. He wrote in his diary:

After a disagreeable journey across an elevated plain with a cold piercing wind and a sprinkling of rain we finally came to the edge of an eminence which overlooked the valley of Chota. And a view of such unparalleled magnificence presented itself that I must pronounce it one of the great wonders of Nature. I made a couple of feeble sketches this evening in recollection of the scene. My ideal of the Cordilleras is realized.[6]

Major works of art soon came into being: a scene on the Magdalena River, the falls of Tequendama, and the mountains Puresé, Cayambe, Pichincha, Cotopaxi, and Chimborazo. The huge painting (10 x 5½ feet) Heart of the Andes, 1859, may be considered a summing up of what Church, under Humboldt’s guidance, discovered in the Andes.



[1] Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America. Translated from the German by Thomasina Ross. Huntington reports that Church owned volumes 1 and 3 of the 1852 London edition, but that volume 2 was missing. David Carew Huntington, “Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900): Painter of the Adamic New World Myth” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1960), 40. In his dissertation Huntington cites important information and passages from Church’s writings. These materials are no longer found in books and articles Huntington published later.

[2] Church owned Aspects of Nature in Different Lands and Different Climates, with Scientific Elucidations (London: Longman, 1849). Huntington, pp. 39–40.

[3] Aspects of Nature, p. 244. In a note Humboldt refers to his Cosmos, from which he quotes: “Hence landscape painting must be a result at once of a deep and comprehensive reception of the visible spectacle of external nature, and of this inward process of the mind,” p. 363.

[4] Heinrich Klencke, Alexander von Humboldt: A Biographical Monument, trans. Juliette Bauer (London: Ingram, 1852). Huntington, p. 40.

[5] Klencke, pp. 76–78.

[6] Huntington, “Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900): Painter of the Adamic New World Myth,” p. 45.

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