Missing the Difference

Eighteen fifty-seven is easy to ignore; it has little resonance. The catalogue to New Worlds from Old—the comparative exhibition of nineteenth-century American and Australian painting which traveled from the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra to the Corcoran Gallery in Washington—presents it as a year of no particular significance. Yet 1857 dates two key paintings in New Worlds from Old: Frederic E. Church’s Niagara and Eugene von Guérard’s Ferntree Gully in the Dandenong Ranges. If one pair of pictures defines the relationship between landscape painting in the United States and in Australia, this is it.

The similarities between these two paintings are not just that both are big canvases which express awe at the land. They are also the work of the two great midcentury landscape painters on either side of the Pacific, and each transformed the artist’s reputation. Yet the environments in which these works were painted were as different as their contemporary impacts. What was generally difficult for Church was easy for von Guérard, and vice versa.

When Church painted Niagara Falls, his choice of subject required no explanation. This was not just a major tourist attraction visited by thousands of people every year since the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, but already a site of world interest. After visiting J. M. W. Turner in London in 1847, the American photographer J. J. E. Mayall recorded: “He told me he should like to see Niagara, as it was the greatest wonder in Nature; he never tired of my description of it.”¹ Competition to paint the most sublime view was intense. As noted by Elizabeth McKinsey, nearly every significant American landscape painter depicted the Falls in the 1850s, each struggling to present it in a novel way. Some tried moonlight; others used the icicles, ice cones, and frozen spray of winter to convey its “magical sublimity.” Still others sought new viewpoints—often without realizing that they had been anticipated by one or more of the hundreds of European artists who had depicted the Falls since the late seventeenth century.²

The challenge for Church was to rise above this ruck with an even more spectacular painting; his solution was to eschew novel times of day or year. His viewpoint—the Horseshoe Falls from the Canadian side of the border—was one that had been painted by many earlier artists. But Church’s treatment of the water was nothing if not flash, and his composition was radical: he cut the land out of his foreground, taking the viewer to the brink of the Falls (Figure 1).

Niagara became Church’s first “Great Picture,” exhibited as an entertainment in itself. Together with the New York printmakers Williams, Stevens and Williams, Church showed it first in New York for four weeks, then in Great Britain. Its 1858 tour went from London to Glasgow, Manchester, and Liverpool before returning to New York, then traveling south to Baltimore, Washington, Richmond, and New Orleans.

Church’s choice of subject was integral to his success. Had he painted a waterfall of only local significance, his picture would not have become famous, however brilliant its conception and paintwork. “The chef d’oeuvre of Niagaras upon any canvas,” Church’s painting became a sensation. One American reviewer declared it “incontestably the finest oil picture ever painted on this side of the Atlantic.” John Ruskin, who hurried to London to see it, was amazed. The Art Journal—one of sixteen newspapers and magazines to review its first British showing—reckoned that no landscape painting had “ever been so successful.”³ The rewards for Church were immense. Williams, Stevens and Williams paid $4,500 for his canvas, but the transformation

Figure 1.

Frederic E. Church, Niagara, 1857, 42½ × 90½ oil on canvas. In the Collection of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Purchase, Gallery Fund 76.15.

Reproduced by permission of the Corcoran Gallery of Art. All rights reserved.

of Church’s reputation was even more significant. Before Niagara, he had been known within the United States as...