Ashleigh McDermott, Class of 2026

This summer I worked for John Murphy and Ian Shelley at the Loeb, conducting research and preparing an exhibit for the Frederic Church 200, a celebration which many museums are participating in next year. Church belonged to the Hudson River School, the first national school whose work laid the underpinning for an American imagery or imaginary and also, for the founding collection of our college museum. Painting during the antebellum period when the introduction of western territories meant aggravated separation of interests between the slave economies of the South and the industrial economies of the North, Church found national images through natural formations. 

Most of the summer I took to familiarizing myself with Church’s way of thinking: how were these neutered scenes to be public instruments of manifest destiny? Uncovering his ideology through his fascination with Humboldt’s Cosmos, a publication which detailed the naturalist’s journey through South America in search for god’s interrelation of all through natural observation of minerals, plants, and animals, I unravelled how his replicated journey to Colombia and Ecuador was subsequently a search for god, unification, and truth during a time lacking in harmony. Due to the degradation of North America through deforestation, overcultivation, and exploitation, the unspoiled continental Southern landscapes were to reinstate god as sovereign over the Edenic Americas while still maintaining distance from the nationalistic tensions that came with depicting a scene local to the United States. 

The two paintings I was assigned were Autumn in North America and Summer in South America, where continental differences speak to the complications of representing an American identity. His Autumn, a New England forest interior, references the North-South jockeying for national representation, resolved by his Summer, a divine image of fraternal land that emits American exceptionalism while remaining unspecific to how the land is to be controlled. This is something I found interesting in conjunction with Church’s mentor and founder of the school, Thomas Cole, who critiqued man’s dedication to progress and advocated for a ‘juste milieu,’ a pastoral middle ground between man and nature. By neutrally representing territories while doubly formulating a kaleidoscopic land of god, Church was able to reach a large audience, but most times, failed to procure a unified message or image for the nation. 

The theme of sacred geographies stood out to me during my research as they are the physical arrivals to an ever-receeding immateriality, whether that be a national identity, the American West, or the passage into god’s domain. While in the New World, Church used nature as scientific proof of the divine; however, after Darwin’s theory of evolution and the outbreak of the Civil War, Church’s search for god and unification pulled him backwards to the Old World, particularly the Middle East, where biblical sites, ruins, and temples could materially prove god’s sovereignty. How did the shift from finding god in nature to proving divine existence through architecture affect modern conceptions of national identity and religious justifications of territorial expansion?

Curious about Church’s recession from westward expansion, I found interest in Tanner’s View of Palestine, an elevated view of the sprawling holy land with irrigation features and dotted people in the distance. Known as a biblical scene painter and member of the AME Church, Tanner was one of the first prominent black artists in the Western canon and held a complicated relationship with nationality as he indefinitely left America for Paris in order to gain access to civil rights. With works such as Tanner’s, I want to complicate the ways Church naturalizes manifest destiny and nationalism through uprooting contrasting beliefs and representations among similar practices or subject areas. This fall, I will continue the work of researching objects in the collection, producing labels, and writing a brochure to culminate in an exhibition which will doubly honor the role Church plays in the founding collection while also critiquing his use of the genre to convert public spectators into divine speculators. Thank you John and Ian!