![]() In 1965, it was given to the Preservation Society of Newport County, Rhode Island, and purchased in December 1965 by the National Gallery of Art. (1832–1903) was the first owner of the work and passed it to his descendants, who reported that the painting had once been called The Amazon. ![]() The painting was exhibited in New York in 1877 at the Century Association (called A Tropical Morning), and in 1878 at Exposition Universelle. Turner such as Bacchus and Ariadne, and illustrated books on the tropics, such as those by Paul Marcoy. Huntington finds in the painting the influence of Gustave Doré's prints for Paradise Lost, of engravings after J. Īs in The Andes of Ecuador, the sunlight forms a subtle cross. Morning in the Tropics was Church's last and perhaps his greatest psychic landscape. You, self-made New World man, are to be its namer. You, remade, redeemed, twice-born spectator, are the first new man to fix his eyes on that beautiful untouched and unnamed plant. This is the second dawn of human consciousness and the second coming of the cosmic savior: an Easter-Genesis on the Amazon. A fallen Adam and a suffering world are forgotten. Morning in the Tropics is the mystical re-creation and resurrection of earth and man. Huntington offered interpretive reminders of the symbolism of Church's art for its 19th-century American audience, who were Christians optimistic about the future of their young country (though the Civil War, a decade past, tempered these feelings): ![]() it is simply not painting." In the 1960s, Church scholar David C. A drop-curtain may be the work of incontestable genius it may have a thousand merits. In 1880 art critic William Crary Brownell called it "a magnificent drop-curtain. Details include a canoeist, a flock of birds over the river and two others (possibly the amethyst woodstar hummingbird ) perched close to the viewer, and a hut on the right bank.Ĭhurch's once-stellar reception by the 1870s had diminished, though he was still prominent his work was often criticized for an excess of detail and a sense of melodrama. The vantage point is no longer high and detached, but seemingly low enough that a viewer might stand there. The National Gallery of Art notes that "the tightly focused realism, the overall tonal harmony and restrained coloration, and the compositional unity all lend a remarkable cohesiveness to the work". As a result, the composition is more intimate than other South American works. While a high degree of realism and attention to detail remains, the landscape in The River of Light is more local it no longer attempts to capture numerous topographies or climate zones in one image. The work differs in important ways from Church's earlier, monumental South American canvases. Like them, the painting is a composite of the many sketches and drawings Church made while traveling in South America twenty years earlier. It is his last large-scale painting of South America, following pieces such as The Andes of Ecuador (1855) and The Heart of the Andes (1859). National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.Įl Rio de Luz (Spanish for The River of Light also known as Morning in the Tropics) is an 1877 oil painting by American landscape artist Frederic Edwin Church. Painting by Frederic Edwin Church El Rio de Luz (The River of Light)
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