MURA · THE COLLECTION · FREDERIC EDWIN CHURCH

Heart of the Andes

A composite view of the South American Andes painted by Frederic Edwin Church in 1859, 168 by 302.9 centimetres, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Its single-painting exhibition in New York that year drew more than 12,000 paying visitors and made Church the leading landscape painter in the United States.

Frederic Edwin Church · 1859 · Oil on canvas · Romanticism · story written 25 September 2026

What you are looking at

The painting is not a single place. According to Wikipedia, Church "synthesized numerous topographies of the Andes into his composition, from Mount Chimborazo to a plain and a jungle": a pool fed by a waterfall at centre right, the snow-capped Chimborazo of Ecuador in the distance, a hamlet and church on the central plain, and two figures before a cross in the left foreground. Church's signature is cut into the bark of the lit tree at left. Mura's catalogue puts it more simply: a whole world unfolds between tropical foliage, a waterfall and distant snow-covered peaks.

How it was painted

Church (1826–1900) travelled in Ecuador and Colombia in 1853 and 1857, financed by the businessman Cyrus West Field and inspired by Alexander von Humboldt's "Kosmos", retracing Humboldt's routes. The canvas, described by Wikipedia as "very large, yet highly detailed", was shown from 29 April to 23 May 1859 at the Tenth Street Studio Building in a floor-standing, window-like frame about fourteen feet wide, with curtains and a skylight; opera glasses were handed out so that visitors could read the details. Church hoped to ship it to Berlin for Humboldt to see, but Humboldt died on 6 May 1859. Mark Twain wrote in 1860 that "you may count the very leaves on the trees". Church met his future wife Isabel at the New York exhibition.

Where it went

Church sold the picture to William Tilden Blodgett for $10,000, then the highest price paid for a work by a living American artist. After Blodgett's death in 1875 it was acquired by Margaret Worcester Dows, widow of the grain merchant David Dows, who bequeathed it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art on her death in 1909. The credit line is Bequest of Margaret E. Dows, 1909, accession number 09.95. In 1993 the museum staged an exhibition recreating the conditions of the 1859 showing. It hangs in Gallery 760 of the American Wing, opposite Bierstadt's "The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak", as the two were hung at the Metropolitan Fair of 1864.

Why it is in Mura

It anchors the Coast & Countryside collection with the mood "majestic": a painting made for a crowd with opera glasses, now shown on a screen that lets you look as long as you like.