Stop and Look – Frederic Edwin Church’s Niagara Falls from the American Side (1867)
All too few people who visit Edinburgh’s fine National Gallery remember seeing this enormous picture, spectacular though it is. Because nobody who goes there expects to find one of the supreme masterpieces of the American landscape school: a great rarity in Britain. It hangs surrounded by Constable and Turner, and the name of the artist is so little known here that it hardly registers.
But the nineteenth-century Americans were, in reality, the true heirs to Turner and Constable, and Church took Turner’s ideas about sublimity in nature to a new level. He had the advantage of North America’s astonishing scenery, and was determined to paint it with all the rigour and discipline that John Ruskin had recommended in his famous injunction to “go to Nature in all singleness of heart … rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing”. That memorable instruction came in Ruskin’s Modern Painters, which appeared in five influential volumes between 1843 and 1860. The book fell, as one American journal said, “upon the public opinion of the day like a thunderbolt from a clear sky.” Church was one of the most dedicated of all Ruskin’s followers.
He made many studies of Niagara, and had already, in 1857, produced a breathtaking panoramic view of the falls from the very brim on the Canadian side. The extreme fastidious realism of his presentation makes the spectator feel actually present at the scene, experiencing the thrill and even the danger for him- or herself. Church toured these pictures both in America and in Britain, presenting them as spectacles, with “prosceniums” and viewing telescopes like theatrical events.
It is not difficult to believe while scanning this powerful canvas that we’re on a viewing platform like the precarious structure we can see at the left, dwarfed by the scale of the natural phenomenon itself, and in danger of being precipitated into the boiling foam below. The idea of the public being invited to participate to this extent in the drama of large paintings had roots in the eighteenth century, when many artists would offer visitors (for a fee) exclusive ‘private’ viewings of colossal works, often of a Biblical or apocalyptic character, but also of landscapes in the Middle East and elsewhere that were being opened up to tourism at the time.
The fashion for panoramas – 360-degree scenes where the viewer stood in the centre of a circular painting – was part of the same development, beginning in the late eighteenth century and surviving well into Church’s lifetime. Photography played a part, once it had been developed in the 1840s, and many artists, including Church, used the camera to fix their subjects and supply reference material. He based this picture of Niagara on a commercial photograph, as well as on a pencil sketch that he had made some time before. So developing technology helped to alter the course of landscape painting, and the chain of influence passed on to the twentieth century and the spectacle of the early cinema.
