Heart of the Andes

Frederic Edwin Church painted Heart of the Andes in 1859, in his studio at the 10th Street Studio Building in New York. He was 33 years old and the most famous painter in America. The canvas is 5 and a half feet tall and 10 feet wide, and it depicts a panoramic view of the Ecuadorian Andes that Church had visited on two expeditions, in 1853 and 1857. It is the painting that made his career and defined the Hudson River School at its most ambitious. The painting shows a tropical valley in the Andes, with Mount Chimborazo rising in the distance. The composition moves from dense jungle in the foreground, through a temperate zone of grassland and trees, to a frozen peak in the background. A river runs through the valley, and a small cross and a figure praying are visible at the lower left. The sky fills the upper third of the canvas, with sunlight breaking through clouds over the peak. The painting contains every climate zone that the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt had described in his writings about South America, which Church had read and carried with him on his travels. Church exhibited the painting in a specially built gallery on Broadway in 1860, where he charged 25 cents admission. Twelve to thirteen thousand people filed past it each month. He displayed it in a massive frame resembling a window, lit by gas jets concealed behind silver reflectors in a darkened chamber. He advised viewers to look through opera glasses to take in the botanical detail. The exhibition was a sensation, and it made Church the most popular painter in America, a position he held until the Civil War changed the country's appetite for panoramic landscapes. Church had studied with Thomas Cole, the founder of the Hudson River School, from 1844 to 1847. He traveled to South America following Humboldt's footsteps, making oil sketches and drawings that he brought back to New York. Heart of the Andes was synthesized from scores of these sketches, combining views from different locations into a single, impossible panorama. The painting is not a record of a real place. It is a construction, assembled from observation and imagination, designed to convey the full range of nature's variety in a single canvas. Oil on canvas, 168 by 302 centimeters. Church painted with extraordinary precision, building the foliage in tiny, individual strokes of green. The mountain is painted in layers of blue and white, with the snow applied in thick, opaque white. The sky is built in thin glazes of blue and gray, with the sunlight breaking through in warm yellows. The surface has the detail and finish of a photograph, which was Church's intention: he wanted the viewer to feel that they were looking through a window at a real place. The horizontal format and lush palette make this print work well in a living room, dining room, or any room with enough wall space for a large print. The greens, blues, and warm earth tones pair with natural wood, white walls, and rooms with plants. The 18x24 size is the minimum to capture the detail of the foliage. The painting has a grand, optimistic quality that suits rooms with a bold design. The painting entered the Met's collection in 1909, bequeathed by Margaret E. Dows. It is one of the most important American paintings in the museum's collection. This is a public domain artwork (CC0), scanned from the original at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. We print it on archival matte paper at sizes from 8x10 to 18x24 inches, framed or unframed. The image is printed at full resolution with no cropping.