The reproduction of Frederic Edwin Church also needs time to dry in order to be completely ready for shipping, as this is crucial to not be damaged during transportation.īased on the size, level of detail and complexity we need 8-9 weeks to complete the process. High quality and detailing in every inch are time consuming. We will add 1.6' (4 cm) additional blank canvas all over the painting for stretching. All the materials we use are the highest level, being totally artist graded painting materials and linen canvas. Once we get your order, it will be entirely hand-painted with oil on canvas. In suspense, we are suspended.We create our paintings with museum quality and covering the highest academic standards. Our eyes grope to make sense of it all, to see exactly where the shoreline begins and ends. The water, having fallen, with an almighty rush, feels as if it might be being rocked in a great basin.

We cannot quite make out the curve of the Falls. We cannot properly register the movement of the water. The fumy, cloud-like mist adds to our sense of slightly befuddled and even nervous awe because we cannot see exactly what it is that we are seeing.

We are awe-struck before nature's majesty. The way that the sunlight, crossed by the rainbow, falls upon that rocky outcrop at bottom right makes nature seem revelatory in some undisclosed, religiose way. And yet, Church seems to suggest, this is also, paradoxically, a spiritually benign scene. It is too terrifying and too potent for mere man. There is almost nothing but the no-holds-barred muscularity of water. Those two tiny spectators on the extreme left, standing on what looks like an extremely perilous wooden structure, show us the cowed, awe-struck human element. At its centre, we look down into a kind of thickly glowing nothingness. We seem to be on the brink of being engulfed, plunged head-first into the maelstrom. By their size, and the sheer pugnacity of their presence, they were a stand-in for the real thing.

They were often painted on an immense scale because their themes – the dramatic landscapes of America – called for immensity. They were kept hidden behind curtains until the moment of revelation, which provoked aahs! of wonderment in the breathless spectator. Yes, before the advent of the cinema, there were the paintings of Frederic Edwin Church of New York State. Frederic Church.Īnd here is just one example of water sweeping us away, humbling the spectator as we stare and stare into its terrible, roaring eye. And in the wake of all that renewal of water and its potential came Turner, Monet and. Quite true? Well, let us say that it was found to have boundless imaginative possibilities in so far as it enabled the boundlessness of the self to be contemplated, boundlessly, and even reflected back at itself. Two-thirds of the world's surface suddenly became interesting. Water began to take on a life of its own. And then, from later on in the 18th century, came the Romantic impulse. They were also, soberingly, an enduring site of tragedy – there was always death by drowning to provoke a tear. Yet how many painters in the Western tradition really took water seriously as a subject for art before the 19th century? Answers on the back of a postage stamp? The seas were there all right, but they were backdrops to heroic naval skirmishes, a context in which to admire the outlandish, self-preening beauty of ships in full sail. The roiling immensities of water when seen from the cliffs above Le Havre, for example – all that beguiling shape-shifting, all that tonal tricksiness – as Monet would have seen it.

Frederic edwin church niagara