A Canvas as Big as the Country
Don’t ask what Frederic Church’s massive, immersive landscapes mean. Just look.
“We know of nothing,” Henry James observed in 1875, “that is a better proof of the essential impotence of criticism, in the last resort, than Mr. Church’s pictures.” James wasn’t (in this instance) being spiteful. He was trying to sort out a real problem: What did the work of America’s preeminent pa…
The Atlantic