User:Colantmb/sandbox

Cotopaxi is an 1862 oil painting by American artist Frederic Edwin Church, a member of the Hudson River School. The painting depicts Cotopaxi, an active volcano that is also the second highest peak in modern-day Ecuador, spewing smoke and ash across a colorful sunrise. The work was commissioned by well-known philanthropist and collector James Lenox and was first exhibited in New York in 1863. Cotopaxi was met with great acclaim, possibly seen as a "parable" of the Civil War, then raging in the American South, with its casting of light against darkness in a vast tropical landscape. Church first depicted Cotopaxi beginning in 1853 during his first of many travels to South America, forming a series of at least 10 paintings on the subject during his lifetime. Cotopaxi has been called by some art historians the "apex" of the Cotopaxi series or Church's "ultimate interpretation" of the eponymous volcano.

Cotopaxi is currently exhibited by the Detroit Institute of Arts, while other members of the series are housed in various public museums and private collections, including the New Britain Museum of American Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Art Institute of Chicago, and Yale University Art Gallery.

The Hudson River School
Church was a member of the Hudson River School, which stressed the need to experience the natural world directly in order to depict the same subjects on canvas. Church made many preparatory sketches "on the spot" of his travels throughout South America, including of Cotopaxi, in order to produce the multiple large, dramatic canvases of the subject from the 1850-1860's.

J. M. W. Turner
Cotopaxi was commissioned by James Lenox, an American philanthropist who notably owned the first paintings by English artist J. M. W. Turner in America; these included Staffa, Fingal's Cave (1832) & Fort Vimieux (1831). It is feasible that the painterly style of Turner and his treatment of the sublime influenced Church's approach to Cotopaxi; although, it is uncertain.

Alexander von Humboldt
Church's travels across South America and depictions of Cotopaxi, among other volcanoes like Chimborazo, were a direct result of his interest in the writings and illustrations of naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, who extensively catalogued the mountains and volcanoes of South America. Both Church and Humboldt even over-dramatized the slopes of Cotopaxi's crater and sides, using "artistic license" to exaggerate the vantage point used by the audience to view the landscape.

Artistic Purpose & Analysis
While Church's original interactions with Cotopaxi were heavily influenced by the writings of Humboldt and the influence of his mentor, Thomas Cole, who in turn was heavily influenced by the landscape paintings of Claude Lorrain, Church came into his own by the time he produced Cotopaxi. Church envisioned multiple of his landscape paintings to form "a magnificent landscape triptic...:the 'Chimborazo' [to be] hung on the left, for its expression of the tropical witchery of landscape, the Andean beauty; and the Cotopaxi on the right, as especially representing the Andean grandeur and energy."

In this line, it is unclear if Church originally intended for Cotopaxi to comment on the ongoing Civil War. Some art historians support the assumption that Church composed Cotopaxi to be allegorical to the "struggle in progress" of the Civil War in 1862. On the other hand, others describe Church's efforts as "consciously or not resonating" with an American audience at a time of the war where the Union would begin to prevail. Nonetheless, Cotopaxi earned Church prominence both in America and internationally for his nuanced approach to a natural phenomenon.