Frederic Edwin Church's 'Niagara': The Sublime as Transcendence

Between 1800 and 1860, Niagara Falls was the single most often depicted natural wonder in the New World. So profuse and widely known were images of the Falls in the 1800s that they constitute a separate chapter in the history of nineteenth century landscape art. Rarely, however, had artists encountered a more challenging subject. The pictorial expression of Niagara Falls' renowned impact upon the visitor's imagination appeared impossible to convey adequately. By the 1850s, it was universally asserted that the cataracts' celebrated "sublimity" was beyond the reach of art. When it was first exhibited in New York and London in 1857, Frederic Edwin Church's monumental canvas, Niagara, was immediately hailed as the quintessential representation of Niagara Falls. Not only had the American landscapist selected the archetypal view of the diverse and extensive scene and reproduced the torrent with uncanny verisimilitude, but, to everyone's satisfaction, he had recreated on canvas the transcendent quality of the experience of the sublime. The purpose of this dissertation is to examine the nature of Church's remarkable pictorial achievement, to analyze Niagara as both image and idea in the context of nineteenth century views of Niagara Falls and contemporary conceptions of the cataracts' aesthetic character and symbolic significance. The study is subdivided into four parts. The first, "The Impact of Church's Niagara," examines the critical response to the painting in America and Britain in 1857-59; the second, "Views of Niagara Falls to 1860: Strategies and Solutions," analyzes other pictures of the Falls produced before 1860; the third, "The Image of Church's Niagara," presents a formal analysis of the work; and the fourth, "The Meaning of Church's Niagara," interprets the painting as a depiction of the sublime as transcendence, a typological symbol of the Deity and a cultural icon for Americans in the era of Manifest Destiny. In an Epilogue, Church's two later pictures of Niagara Falls are discussed as well as those by other American landscapists of the late nineteenth century.