Gespiegelte Fassung der elektronischen Zeitschrift auf dem Publikationsserver der Universität Potsdam, Stand: 18. August 2009
Originalfassung zugänglich unter http://www.hin-online.de

HiN - Humboldt im Netz

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Frank Baron

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

4. Going beyond Humboldt: The Cotopaxi Paintings

The juxtaposition of Humboldt and Church helps to show how the painter sought to go beyond the inspirational basis that Humboldt had provided. Church’s Cotopaxi of 1855 and 1857 display a mountain with its conical form in relative peace, just as Humboldt must have experienced it.[1] Church’s sketch of June 26, 1857 shows smoke emanating from the crater, but there is no sign of a major eruption. Later paintings, however, reflect a radical transformation. In the painting of 1861, the mountain is in the midst of an ominous eruption that darkens much of the sky. Finally, in 1862, Church painted an even greater explosion of smoke (now covering part of the sun); the artist was close to suggesting a cataclysmic event.[2] Because neither Humboldt nor Church actually experienced the eruption in that extreme form, Church undertook a fictional dramatization of an event he observed in connection with another mountain.

During this second stay in Ecuador, Church was able to experience the eruption of the volcano Sangay. His description of this phenomenon shows how it impressed him.

Gradually the clouds broke away, the sun shone and gilded with refined gold every slope and ridge that it could touch. Patches of open sky revealed the most lovely blue in contrast to the rich coloring.

My sketch finished, I turned my face, and Lo! Sanga[y], with its imposing plume of smoke stood clear before me. I was startled. Above a serrated, black, rugged group of peaks which form the crater, the columns arose, one creamy white against an opening of exquisitely blue sky, delicate white, cirrus formed, flakes of vapor hung about the great cumulus column and melted away into the azure. The other, black and somber, piled up in huge, rounded forms but sharply against the dazzling white of the column of vapor and piling up higher and higher, gradually was diffused into a yellowish tinted smoke through which would burst enormous heads of black smoke which kept expanding, the whole gigantic mass gradually settling down over the observer in a way that was appalling.

I commenced a sketch of the effect, but constant changes rapidly followed and new beauties were revealed as the setting sun created the black smoke with burnished copper and white cumulus cloud with gold. At intervals of nearly four in five minutes an explosion took place; the first intimation was a fresh mass of smoke with sharply defined outlines rolling above the dark rocks followed by a heavy, rumbling sound which reverberated among the mountains. I was so impressed by the changing effects that I continued making rapid sketches; but all the time I had from the moment I saw the first of them until the sunset was twenty minutes. Dense clouds again settled over the mountains and night took the place of day. The curtain had dropped.[3]

Church filled five sheets with sketches. His intense excitement seems to have been infected by Humboldt’s scientific exploration of volcanoes. Carr has shown that Church had studied Humboldt’s discussion of this volcano in Cosmos.[4] Church even took risks to climb up the mountain to solve what he understood to be the “Sangay problem.”[5]

Although Humboldt, like Church, was well aware of Cotopaxi’s history of devastating eruptions, neither was able to observe a serious outburst from the mountain. During his second trip Church was at least able to make sketches of fire, smoke, and stones spitting. His narrative comes close, however, to expressing the excitement and drama of a cataclysmic event. The paintings of Cotopaxi in the years 1861 and 1862 became the beneficiaries of imaginative transferences and projections that Sangay and the history of Cotopaxi suggested.[6]

Alexander von Humboldt, Cotopaxi (1810), Vues des Cordillères

Fig. 7    

Alexander von Humboldt, Cotopaxi (1810), Vues des Cordillères

 

Frederic Edwin Church, Oil Study for Cotopaxi (1861), Collection of Nelson C. White

Fig. 8    

Frederic Edwin Church, Oil Study for Cotopaxi (1861), Collection of Nelson C. White

Such juxtapositions could be extended to others. A selection may suffice to show that Humboldt’s images served as guideposts in a search for ideal locations in the tropics. They were points of departure for experimentation and exploration. Because Church’s most spectacular works were the result of his South American trips, scholars have paid little attention to Church’s many visits to Mexico, where he was also seeking out sites that Humboldt had visited and written about. Church was in Mexico for the first time in 1883 and subsequently made fourteen more winter excursions there. Again, Klencke’s biography becomes a guide:

After a journey of thirty days, they [Humboldt, Bonpland, and Montúfar] arrived in Acapulco, a western port of New Spain. . . . He [Humboldt] found a milder and fresher climate on the plains of Chilpantzingo and Ta[x]co, lying about 6000 or 7000 toises above the level of the sea, and whose rich silver mines he visited; thence their journey lay over Cuerna[v]aca, and through the fog exhalations of Guchilaque to the beautiful town of Mexico [City]. . .

In January 1804 Humboldt set out on a more extensive excursion, to examine the eastern side of the Cordilleras, of Mexico; the altitudes of the volcanoes Popocatepetl and [I]ztaccihuatl, were trigonometrically measured, as well as the pyramid of Chohila, which was once built of bricks, by the Tulteks, and which was ascended on account of the beautiful view it affords on the snow-covered tops of the mountains and the smiling valleys of Tlascala. After these investigations, Humboldt proceeded to Xalapa, over Perote, and had to pass through almost impenetrable forests of oak and fir trees, through which a road was subsequently made according to his plans, in consequence of his three-times-repeated barometric measurements of the locality. Cofre, a mountain, situated near Perote, and 162 toises higher than the peak of Teneriffe, was also ascended and measured, and also the peak of Orizava, past which his way led him. After a stay in these regions, which had proved most fertile in scientific studies and their results, Humboldt and Bonpland returned to Vera Cruz on the [B]ay of Mexico, fortunately escaped the yellow fever, raging in this sterile and waterless plain, and set sail for Hava[n]a, on a Spanish frigate, to take possession of the collections left there in the year 1800.[7]

We observe the previously discussed pattern relating to Colombia and Ecuador. Again, Church seems to have consulted Humboldt’s folio volumes to locate important sites.[8] Church’s repeated visits reflect Humboldt’s persistent guiding hand. The artist’s work in Mexico no longer presents radical and adventurous departures, however. The landscapes contain fewer surprises; the attention to detail no longer appears important. Nevertheless, the juxtaposition of Humboldt’s illustrations and Church’s sketches and paintings may aid in the evaluation of these lesser-known works of the artist.

In the second volume of Cosmos, Humboldt treats landscape painting.[9] Church might have paid close attention to a theoretical segment that pointed to the exciting artistic possibilities of the Andes. In the interpretation of this moment of enlightenment, as Stephen Jay Gould sees it, Church came to the realization that science and art were compatible and that a great painter had to become, in a sense, a scientist. Gould asserts that “Church was the most scientific of painters,” admired for “his penchant for accuracy in observation and rendering, both for intricate botanical details in his foregrounds and geological forms in his backgrounds.”[10]



[1] Manthorne, Tropical Renaissance, p. 71. Cf. David Huntington, The Landscapes of Frederic Edwin Church: Vision of an American Era (New York: Braziller, 1966), pp. 11–20.

[2] David C. Huntington, The Landscapes of Frederic Edwin Church: Vision of an American Era (New York: Braziller, 1966), illustrations III, 31, and 38.

[3] Huntington, “Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900): Painter of the Adamic New World Myth,” p.103.

[4] Carr points out that in Church’s copy of Cosmos, the corner of vol. 5, p. 249, is folded over. Church found Humboldt’s description of Sangay there: ”The most active of the South American volcanoes, and indeed of all those which I have here specially indicated, is the Sangay, which is also called the Volcan de Macas, because the remains of this ancient city, so populous in the early period of the Conquista, are situated upon the Rio Upano, only 28 geographical miles to the south of it. . . . I myself have heard it thunder for months together, especially in the early morning, in Chillo, the pleasant country seat of the Marquis de Selvalegre [Montúfar, de Selva Alegre] near Quito . . . “ Carr, p. 244.

[5] Huntington reports: “Church had intended to go all the way to the volcano in order to settle ‘the Sanga[y] problem’ by exposing ‘the wild stories about the mountain,’ but eight inches of wet snow that night and the prospect of the hazards of a quick melting induced him to abandon the venture even though ‘so near completion’ and ‘to return without delay.’” Huntington, “Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900): Painter of the Adamic New World Myth,” p. 104.

[6] Katherine Emma Manthorne, “Legible Landscapes: Text and Image in the Expeditionary Art of Frederic Church,” in Edward C. Carter II, ed., Surveying the Record: North American Scientific Exploration to 1930 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1999), p. 140.

[7] Klencke, pp. 80–82. 

[8] Carr shows numerous examples of sketches that show connection to the places that Humboldt had visited or written about. The excursion to Oaxaca, for example, might have been inspired by Humboldt’s description of the immense cypress tree: “. . . there is an enormous trun[k] of cupressus disticha (sabino) of 36 meters.” Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain, trans. John Black, vol. 2 (London: Longman et al., 1811), p. 237. See Carr, vol. 1, p. 482. Humboldt himself never visited the tree and had the information about it secondhand. Margot Faak, ed., Alexander von Humboldt. Reise auf dem Río Magdallena durch die Anden und Mexico, vol. 2, (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1990), p. 365. Church made ink and graphite tracings of Mayan art, an interest that could have been inspired by Humboldt’s many plates. Carr, vol. 1, pp. 454–57.

[9] Cosmos: A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe, trans. E. C. Otté (New York: Harper, 1863), pp. 82–98. According to Huntington, Church owned volumes 1, 2, and 4 of the 1849 London edition and volume 5 of the New York 1859 edition. Huntington, p. 40.

[10] Kelley et al., p. 99 and Gould, p. 99. Cf. Albert Ten Eyck Gardner, “Scientific Sources of the Full-Length Landscape: 185[9],” Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art 4 (1945): 59–65.

 

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