Frederic Edwin Church

Do you own a work by Frederic Edwin Church and would you like to know more about its value? Our Experts will carry out a free appraisal of your painting, to provide you with an estimate of the market price, then assist you to sell at the best price.

Status, estimate and price for the artist Frederic Edwin Church

Price of a painting: 230,000 – 1,200,000 €.

If you would like to have a work by Frederic Edwin Church appraised, our experts will take care of everything.

An outstanding sense of detail and light

Church Frederic Edwin is an American painter whose work presented a sort of apotheosis of the Romantic movement. His favourite field in the subjects he paints is landscape. He was a pupil of Thomas Cole, one of the most important representatives of American Romanticism and the founder of the Hudson River School from 1844 to 1846. It was due to his teaching that Edwin painted landscapes. He began by copying his method of depicting monumental, dramatic landscapes. However, while most of the students at the Hudson School were content to reproduce Cole’s methods, with fixed rules of landscape composition, Church succeeded in renewing his method of representation through an analysis of nature that was as precise as it was objective. It was this observation that prompted him, around 1890, to embark on a journey through American territory in order to refine his study of the motifs that made up his painting. The painter concentrated in particular on the work of light, which he portrays in his works in a quasi-photographic manner. His work can be likened to that of Asher B. Durand, an American painter who was a contemporary of Church, in the sense that the latter had also used his studies to compose immense landscapes.

Church and the “luminists”

Church is part of a young tradition of artists who are no longer content to “idealise” the landscapes they paint, as classical landscape techniques have always intended. He was much closer to the group of American “luminists”, who focus was on the hyperrealism of the light in their paintings, which raised the intensity of the details represented (Twilight over a Wilderness).

A romantic artist

Church’s attraction to the sublime inspired him to paint nature – a multitude of mountains, glaciers, virgin forests and waterfalls [Le Niagara 1857, The Heart of the Andes, 1859], thus joining the wide repertoire of the great European romanticism with Caspard David Freidrich and Turner. Their power of suggestion is the same, the symbolism contained in the paintings is as elementary and powerful as ever. At this time, the expression of Romanticism in the paintings of European artists was derisory, but it was expressed much more through a work such as that of Church, whose dream Baudelaire, in the Salon of 1859, said about the dream, that it was regrettable that the imagination deserted the landscape, and nostalgically evoked “the Romantic landscape and even the Romanesque landscape”.

Recognising Frederic Edwin Church’s signature

Like many artists, Frederic Edwin Church did not sign all of his works. However, you will find below an example of a signature in order to give you a first idea. Variations of this signature exist: do not hesitate to contact one of our experts to authenticate a signature in a formal way.

Appraising and selling a painting by Frederic Edwin Church

If you own a painting or any other sculpture by Church, ask for a free estimate via our online form.

You will then be contacted by a member of our team of experts and auctioneers to give you an independent view of the market price of your painting. In the event of a sale, our specialists will also advise you on the various options available to sell your work at the best price.