Five years after his second trip to Ecuador, American landscape painter Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900) painted the volcano erupting at sunrise. As the sublime, romantic composition unfurls in front of us, our eyes are first drawn toward the fiery sun, which dramatically reflects off the river at middle ground. Surrounded by thick, gray smoke emitted from the volcano, the incandescent orb pierces the cloud of dense ash, casting a soft, warm glow on the landscape.
The rugged cliffs in the foreground are mostly still in pre-dawn shadow, but the crags blush as they catch the morning light. A roaring waterfall, white with froth, is partially tinted a rosy hue from the rising sun. As with many of Church’s paintings, a copse of trees with a pastoral scene at the left foreground is executed with careful attention to detail. Each leaf and branch is considered. As the landscape recedes into the distance, the resolution of the painting fades, becoming increasingly atmospheric.
Although Church’s painting depicts an erupting volcano in Ecuador, it resonated with Americans. Amidst the chaos of the Civil War (1861–1865), the painting came to be interpreted as an allegory for good’s triumph over evil.
Painters, writers, and poets metaphorically used extreme weather or natural disasters to express the emotional turmoil of war and societal upheaval. During its 1863 exhibition in New York City, “Cotopaxi” was highly acclaimed. The American press, associating volcanoes to bombs and ash clouds to cannon smoke, claimed Church’s painting expressed “pillars of warning rather than of guidance.”
The School of Nature
Church was born in Hartford, Connecticut, into a family of means. That enabled him to pursue his fascination with art at a young age. From age 18 to 20, Church studied with landscape painter Thomas Cole in the Catskill Mountains, absorbing Cole’s process of creating sketches directly from life, then returning to the studio to design and develop an idealized final composition. Cole is thought to be the founder of the Hudson River School, a group of 19th-century American landscape painters.
Church was fascinated by the volcanoes of the Andes during his first trip to South America in 1853. Upon returning to the continent four years later with artist Louis Rémy Mignot, Church was prolific in his creation of oil and pencil sketches of the volcanoes Cotopaxi, Sangay, and Chimborazo.
In the five years between Church’s second visit to Ecuador and the creation of “Cotopaxi” in 1862, the landscape painter created “Niagara” (1857), “The Heart of the Andes” (1859), and “Twilight in the Wilderness” (1860). He internalized composition and color lessons from each of these grand landscapes.
Elements from each of these paintings—Niagara’s turbulent waterfall, Mount Chimborazo fading into the backdrop of the Andes, and the smoldering, orange altocumulus clouds in the wilderness—are integrated in “Cotopaxi.” The canvas can be viewed as a culminating composite of outdoor life sketches and lessons learned from the large-scale, finished paintings.
“Cotopaxi” was commissioned by philanthropist James Lenox, who already owned paintings by English painter J. M. W. Turner. Turner painted with far more loose and expressive brushwork than the Hudson River School painters. Church’s work paid homage to imaginative and compositional elements of Turner’s paintings—notably “The Fighting Temeraire” (1838), which was highly praised at its 1839 Royal Academy exhibition.
“Cotopaxi” is more than a faithful rendering of the South American landscape brought to life by a highly skilled painter. Rather, it’s a testament to Church’s compositional virtuosity, his captivation with the writing of naturalist Alexander von Humboldt and art critic John Ruskin, and the turmoil of the Civil War. Viewers interpreted the painting as an allegory of the dawn of the good amid the war raging in the American South.
