Frederic Edwin Church (b.1826, Hartford, CT; d.1900, New York, NY) West Rock, New Haven, 1849 Oil on canvas John Butler Talcott Fund 1950.10

Born to a prosperous and prominent Hartford, Connecticut, family, Frederic Church renounced a career in his family's textile business in 1844 when he apprenticed with landscape painter Thomas Cole. After Cole's 1849 death, Church inherited his teacher's mantle as one of the leaders of the Hudson River School. During the 1850s and 1860s he was one of the most famous and most richly compensated painters America had ever seen. His show-stopping masterpieces, such as Niagara (1857; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) and The Heart of the Andes (1859; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) were seen by thousands of paying viewers in America and abroad and were acclaimed by critics as supreme achievements of landscape painting.

If one were to pick a single picture from his early career that most clearly predicted this extraordinary success, it would be West Rock, New Haven. When that painting first appeared on view at the National Academy of Design in New York in 1849, art critics for respected journals such as The Knickerbocker and the Bulletin of the American Art-Union hailed it as a "faithful, natural picture" that showed that Church had "taken his place, at a single leap, among the great masters of landscape." Largely on the strength of West Rock, New Haven, Church was elected a full member of the National Academy, the youngest artist ever so honored by that august institution.

West Rock, along with Hooker and Company Journeying through the Wilderness from Plymouth to Hartford, in 1636 (1846; Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford) is one of a series of landscapes based on significant events in Connecticut colonial history. The painting is based on sketches of the landscape near New Haven that Church made in July 1848. One of these is a meticulous drawing, with extensive annotations, of West Rock, one of two striking bluffs rising out of the plain just outside the city.

A work of lyrical beauty, West Rock celebrates the pastoral charm of the American landscape and the unique character of one of its geological monuments, and also pays homage to the labors of the industrious citizens who were reaping the bounty of this new Paradise. Yet the painting also recounts a passage in colonial history and symbolizes a basic principle on which the nation was founded—opposition to the tyranny of the monarchy. In 1649 Edward Whalley, William Goffe, and several other prominent judges sentenced King Charles I to death for crimes against the English people. When the monarchy was restored in 1660, many of the judges were executed by Charles II; Whalley and Goffe, however, fled the country. In New Haven, sympathetic colonists kept them hidden in a cave in West Rock during periods when royal agents were searching for them in Connecticut. Later the rock was inscribed with the words "Opposition to tyrants is obedience to God," and the story became a symbol of the nation's struggle for independence from Britain as well as a prominent reminder of the ideals upon which the nation was founded.

West Rock, New Haven was purchased by Cyrus W. Field, who would later become famous as the guiding force behind the first transatlantic telegraph cable. In the late 1840s Field often accompanied Church on sketching excursions in the Connecticut countryside. Later the two were favorite traveling companions on longer trips throughout the southern United States (1851) and South America (1853). The hayfield and the white steeple, which do not appear in Church's initial drawing, can be read as puns on Field's and Church's surnames.

For further reading:

Franklin Kelly and Gerald L. Carr, The Early Landscapes of Frederic Edwin Church, 1845-1854 (Fort Worth: Amon Carter Museum, 1987)
Franklin Kelly, Frederic Edwin Church and the National Landscape (Washington, D.C. and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988)

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