Object number1864.1.16

Autumn in North America

Datec. 1856

Artist Frederic Edwin Church (American, 1826-1900)

CultureAmerican

MediumOil on board

DimensionsUnframed: 11 1/4 x 17 in. (28.58 x 43.18 cm)
Framed: 18 x 23 7/8 x 2 1/4 in. (45.72 x 60.64 x 5.72 cm)

Credit LineGift of Matthew Vassar

On View

On view

Period19th c

Classification(s)

Painting

Terms

North and Central America

SignedSigned lower right: F CHURCH

ProvenanceCollections: Elias Magoon

Vassar Exhibitions

Second Sight: Originality, Duplicity, and the Object

Exhibition HistoryAll Seasons and Every Light, Vassar College Art Gallery, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY, October 14 - December 16, 1983; DeCordova and Dana Museum and Park, Lincoln, MA, February 5 - March 25, 1984; Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, FL, March 25 - July 1, 1984; Mary and Leigh Block Gallery, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, November 16, 1984 - January 13, 1985;

The Painted Sketch: American Impressions from Nature, 1830-1880, Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX, June 21- September 20, 1998;

The Humanizing Landscapes: Geography, Culture and the Magoon Collection, Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY, October 5 - December 20, 2000;

Second Sight: Originality, Duplicity, and the Object, Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY, January 14 - April 10, 2005;

A Focused Collection: The Hudson River School, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, April 21 - July 29, 2007; Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY, August 17 - October 19, 2007;

Paris--New York; Modern Paintings in 19th and 20th Century Master Works from the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York, Shimane Art Museum, Matsue, Japan, March 7 - May 11, 2008; Ishibashi Museum of Art, Kurume, Japan, May 17 - July 20, 2008; Yamagata Museum of Art, Yamagata, Japan, July 30 - August 31, 2008; Fuchu Art Museum, Fuchu, Japan, September 6 - November 3, 2008; Miyazaki Prefectural Art Museum, Miyazaki, Japan, November 14 - December 14, 2008

Label TextThis painting, like all works that bear the credit line to Matthew Vassar, arrived at the college at its founding in 1864. They were, for the most part, assembled by Elias Magoon, a Baptist minister, art collector, and early trustee of Vassar College. Magoon bought this work, along with two others, from the artist in 1856, still some eight years before his report to the trustees of Vassar College in 1864, convincing them of the need for a museum and collection of original works of art, rather than the copies that they were then acquiring. The work of Frederic Edwin Church is associated by most scholars with the apogee of the inventiveness and expressiveness of the Hudson River School, the work of several generations of artists who believed in exploring the range of natural beauty in the northeastern American landscape. Church himself created the largest, most sublime and operatic of these landscapes, usually not specific renderings of actual places but often Romantic amalgamations of the most striking and picturesque locales. Church’s studio and home, Olana, is located in Hudson, New York, some forty miles north of Vassar College. The large version of Autumn in North America resides there, originally stemming from a commission from Church’s parents in that year. Vassar’s painting, like most purchased by Magoon, is small in scale yet holds a tremendous amount of visual information, rendered with the same intensity of Church’s larger works. The period of the 1850s was one of the most productive of the artist’s career, culminating in several of his best known compositions, including possibly his two greatest tours de force, Niagara (1857, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., now in the National Gallery or Art, D.C.) and Heart of the Andes (1859, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). This was also the time of his travels to South America in 1853, inspired by his reading of the journeys of German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt that served as a watershed of visual resources for much of his career, including that for Summer in South America, an oil sketch made in Ecuador, which is also in the collection at Vassar.

Object information is a work in progress and may be updated as new research findings emerge. To help improve this record, please email loebcollections@vassar.edu