Through American Eyes: Frederic Church And The Landscape Oil Sketch

This exhibition displays one highly important aspect of the work of the celebrated American landscape painter, Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900), his landscape oil sketches. Church was a leading member of the Hudson River School of landscape painters, active in the mid-19th century, and a key American exponent of the oil sketch.

Oil sketches have become objects of appreciation and study in their own right. Among students of American art, Church’s sketches in particular are admired for their freshness and originality. This exhibition – organised in collaboration with the Terra Foundation for American Art and the National Galleries of Scotland – brings together some 30 oil sketches.

Works are drawn from the incomparable collections of the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, New York, and Olana, Church’s picturesque estate along the Hudson River, now a New York State Historic Site. They are joined in the exhibition by a single, monumental painting, 'Niagara Falls, from the American Side' (1867), showing the relationship between sketch and finished masterpiece.