MURA · THE COLLECTION · FREDERIC EDWIN CHURCH

View of Cotopaxi

View of Cotopaxi is an oil painting by Frederic Edwin Church from 1857, showing the Ecuadorian volcano Cotopaxi from a tropical valley. It measures 62.2 by 92.7 cm and was finished in his studio before his second journey to South America. It hangs in Gallery 161 of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Frederic Edwin Church · 1857 · Oil on canvas · Romanticism · story written 25 September 2026

What you are looking at

The catalogue entry describes a waterfall and tropical greenery leading the eye towards a distant, snow-covered volcano. Cotopaxi is the second highest peak in Ecuador. Church painted it at least ten times; this canvas, the museum says, was completed in his studio just before his second visit to the region, which took place in 1857.

How it was painted

Church, a pupil of Thomas Cole, belonged to the second generation of the Hudson River School, whose painters stressed direct experience of the natural world. He travelled to South America in 1853 and again in 1857, staying mainly in Quito and visiting the volcanoes and cities of present-day Colombia and Ecuador. The first trip was financed by the businessman Cyrus West Field. Church was inspired by the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, whose Kosmos put forward a vision of the interconnectedness of nature and gave the landscape painter a role in portraying it. He made sketches on the spot and worked them up into finished canvases in his New York studio. The museum reads the painting in the terms of its time: for Church and other Christian viewers, nature in its creative and destructive power was evidence of the divine, while the picture also reflected an imperialist vision at a moment when officials in the United States eyed Latin America for expansion.

Where it went

The painting went straight to Chicago. Walter Wright owned it from 1857, and it was shown there in 1859 simply as Landscape and in 1863, at the Sanitary Commission exhibition, as South America. It passed by descent through the Webster family to Mary Jennette Hamlin, who gave it to the Art Institute in 1919 in memory of Mr. and Mrs. Louis Dana Webster. It was still catalogued as South America in the museum's handbooks of the 1920s. It has been lent to the Hudson River School exhibition shared with the Whitney in 1945 and to Creation and Renewal: Views of Cotopaxi by Frederic Edwin Church at the National Museum of American Art in Washington.

Why it is in Mura

It belongs to Mura's Impressionist Life collection with a majestic mood: greenery, a waterfall and a snow peak far off.