Frederic Edwin Church’s The Aegean Sea, 1877

Frederic Edwin Church was born in 1826 in Harford, Connecticut, and rose to prominence as a member of the Hudson River School of Painters. His creative success may be attributed to his privileged upbringing. His father founded and was the CEO of Aetna Insurance. Benjamin Coe taught him his first lecture. By the 1950s and 1960s, Frederic Church had been America’s most prominent painter. In the 1850s and 1860s, people could wait and spend fifty cents to see the single canvas at his New York dealer, William Stevens & Williams. The bulk of his works portrayed dramatic landscapes that depicted exceptional and sublime moments of nature. In 1877, Church was suffering from rheumatism, which crippled his left hand, hence compelling him to paint with his left hand. Frederic Church began designing and redesigning various aspects of his home, Olana in 1877. The home was a Moorish pace on the Hudson River. He also traveled to Mexico and Maine in summer and winter respectively and painted Mount Katahdin region. This essay describes The Aegean Sea picture that is one of the greatest works of Frederic Church in 1877.

The Aegean Sea 1877 by Frederic Edwin Church

The Aegean Sea art comprises of the interplay of space and light-bearing significant aesthetic shifts. The picture is more than what is commonly referred to as marine paintings because portrays a breeze that is uncomfortable. The profoundly luminous color and light create a harmony of the tints and depict close rays of light stretching from the sky to the ground. The resulting warmth creates a wide and far-reaching perspective of the picture that fascinates a thoughtful spectator.

The artist exhibits freedom to consider modern aesthetic possibilities, especially in the handling of brown, orange, gold and grey colors to differentiate land from the sky and the seas. The excellence of the landscape is enhanced by placing the highly-forested mountains before the sea. On the other hand, the sea itself is undecorated, making the scene to appear adventurous. The cool palette reflects on the afternoon sunlight and gives the painting an informal tone that suggests that it is late and about to rain. More so, the light of the picture is abetted by adjusting the direction of the nearest shadow of trees. What is more, Frederic Church utilizes cloud puffs and accents the horizon with clarity to make the picture unique in its appeal. The gorgeous scheme of color enhances the viewer’s emotional appeal and demonstrates the expanded vision of the painter.

The evening demonstrates Frederic’s ability to utilize color schemes. To send a message. A thin and still water and a sky that is receding into a vortex-like distance creates an image of a daybreak that is associated with rains. The shoreline is not distant neither is the horizon significantly high. The spiraling visual rhythm moves from one part of the painting to another. The closeness of the sky and land is combined with penetrating sunlight to reflect on the approaching rain, which illuminates on the current weather of the coastline.

The painter also presents the mountainous landscape with a remarkable freshness and informality. The impressionistic strategies are an indication of freedom in the aesthetic exploration and innovation that reveal an evolution of an artist. The simplified compositional scheme in the Evening on the Sea shows calm waters. Alternating water bands and marsh grasses, and the distant line of the water and the background of mountains archives a significant sense of balance and order. The painter’s refinements ensure that each of the entities is distinguishable from the other. Seawater can be distinguished from the sunlight and the projecting branches of foliage. The mountains that are unobscured by the atmosphere are lyrically harmonious compositions of the picture.

The painter restricts himself few objects, the light, the water, the marshes, the sky and the mountains. Using warm tones of brown, gold and russet tone evokes a strong sense of season and place while the brilliant painting of foliage illuminates a joyous celebration of nature’s flamboyance. Marshes are a common subject of the landscape painting because they indicate wetness. By effectively depicting different affinities, freedom in the utilization of color schemes is enhanced.

In conclusion, simple compositions and carefully textured brushwork by Frederic Church evoke feelings of the scenes among the viewers. The adorned scene of a buffy ground, scraggly trees, low-lying points and dampness trigger a wistful and poignant sense of reverie. Eve thing is wonderful and beautiful in its own right. The vertical composition echoes the diminishing perspective of a long stretching sea and is eventually met with the mountain that is covered with overarching trees and shrubs. Delicate coloring and dreamy atmospheric effects render the picture imitable. Perhaps the peculiar field of color made him an unrivaled painter of his time. Shades are profound and glow warmly on the fringes with the light that is reflected from the sky at a distance.