Frederic Edwin Church is widely considered one of the most important 19th-century American landscape painters and was certainly one of the most popular. In his day, people lined up to see his expansive, dramatic canvases picturing exotic locales: Caribbean jungles, Andean volcanoes, Mediterranean ruins, Arctic icebergs. Stand in front of his 7.5-foot-wide “Niagara” and you’ll find yourself reaching for your barrel, convinced you’ll plummet over the edge.
But before he trekked the peaks of South America or piloted a rowboat off the coast of Labrador, sketchbook in hand, the Hartford, Conn.-born artist studied surroundings closer to home. When he was just 22 and mourning the death of his mentor, eminent painter Thomas Cole, he made his first trip to Vermont. Though he never traveled farther north than New Haven, Church was enamored of the state and returned eight times during his career.
“Frederic Church in Vermont” at Middlebury College Museum of Art gathers more than 40 works by the artist, most of them summertime plein air oil studies and graphite sketches made between 1848 and 1850. A handful of finished paintings that would’ve been completed in his New York City studio during the winter months, as well as a couple of important paintings not loaned but on display as reproductions, are quieter and smaller than his most famous works but still convey his flair for the spectacular.
The exhibition is the last curated by Richard Saunders, who led the Middlebury College Museum of Art for more than 40 years. Saunders, 76, retired as director last year. Though he will stay on at Middlebury through December as chief strategist in planning for the college’s new art museum, currently slated to open in 2029, the exhibition is a bookend to an illustrious curatorial career. As Saunders explained at the opening reception, the first show he curated, in 1981, was about Daniel Wadsworth — the patron who encouraged Cole to take Church on as a student. Since then, Saunders has curated more than 30 exhibitions and conceived 20 more during his time at Middlebury.
What has been particularly satisfying about “Frederic Church in Vermont,” Saunders said, “is to find the important art narrative in my backyard.” He has traveled from Castleton to Cuttingsville in search of what brought Church to those places. Many of them don’t look so different today from the way they did when the artist visited more than 175 years ago. Saunders’ comprehensive timeline and extensive label texts offer visitors significant context. A handwritten letter from Church to Cole’s 10-year-old son, for instance, explains some of Vermont’s appeal: “that is the fishing.”
While they convey minutiae more than majesty, Church’s studies provide a fascinating look into his process. A few, such as pencil sketches of a snapped butternut tree, plants and a cave from his 1848 trip, pay attention to the particulars of individual landscape elements as though each were a character. To these, he added descriptions such as “mossy” written on the rock wall of the cave.
Sun just set … whole effect glorious beyond description
Frederic Church
Many of his sketches are mostly notes. “Sunset Over Walker Mountain” gives only a pencil ridgeline and gestural white chalk scribbles indicating clouds; on it, Church writes, “Sun just set — Light — lower part golden orange, upper, / reddish orange — Shadows warm and mottled / whole effect glorious beyond description.”
Church translates that memory and others into works such as “Twilight, ‘Short Arbiter ’Twixt Day and Night,’ (Sunset)” from 1850, in which the sky’s intense glow as the sun drops below purple mountains seems to capture a split second with almost photographic attention to detail.
Other works incorporate that verisimilitude into compositions imbued with a longer time span, such as “Otter Creek, Middlebury, Vermont.” The creek runs languidly through golden-hour light, which delineates whisper-thin leaves and branches sprouting around the banks of a waterfall; thunderheads are just gathering in the pale, luminous sky.
Nearby on the wall, a similar light falls on a very different landscape in the 1850 “Study for New England Scenery” — a little painting, 12 by 15 inches, at which Church has thrown the kitchen sink. It’s an imaginary place with four mountains, some waterfalls, a mill, a town in the distance, an outcropping of trees, a sailboat, tiny cows, a couple crossing a bridge with a wagonload of goods and their dog. Imagine an Addison County version of Peter Jackson’s Rivendell, and you get the idea. (The painting’s final 1851 incarnation, not included in the show, pares all that back, giving more space and light to a Camel’s Hump-esque peak reflected in water.)
The stars of this show are the pieces in which Church doesn’t invent a magical landscape but allows us to share his wonder at an authentic one. “On Otter Creek,” also from 1850, is one of these. It’s centered on the Gorham Covered Bridge, a wooden bridge that still stands in Pittsford. The wall label notes that this would have been a symbol of harmony between man and the landscape. The composition reinforces that duality, with a dark foreground, including the bridge, and light mountains and sky in the distance.
The space under the bridge visually sucks you into the painting, while the structure’s rectangular geometry becomes a barrier, almost modernist against a classical backdrop. Light marries background and foreground, spilling under the bridge toward the viewer as it’s reflected in Otter Creek. A contemporary Vermonter who has seen countless covered-bridge pictures comes to this one as Church might have. We see something strange, even a little unnatural, but wholly in balance with the landscape.
This year marks the 200th anniversary of Church’s birth, which means there are a number of shows about him across the country and a general reconsideration of his impact on American art. In a recent essay for the Atlantic, Susan Tallman points out that even 19th-century critics such as Henry James were stumped searching for meaning in Church’s work. Where other Hudson River School painters such as Cole and Albert Bierstadt were overtly political, celebrating westward expansion or moralizing through allegorical scenes, Church’s canvases were often considered masterfully painted but primarily, well, pretty.
Yet with this collection of works, Saunders paints a picture of a young Church whose motivations we understand because he seems a lot like the average Middlebury student. He’s a bit at loose ends, wants to get some fishing in and, in his travels, connects profoundly with the Vermont landscape. He didn’t need an ideological project: Nurturing his affinity for nature propelled him to the extraordinary. ➆
The original print version of this article was headlined “Take Me to Church | Middlebury College Museum of Art paints a picture of 19th-century landscape artist Frederic Church’s time in Vermont”
This article appears in June 24 • 2026.
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