The Artist’s Touch: Materiality and Frederic Church

Although Frederic Edwin Church is best known for his massive landscape paintings, his critical and popular success in the mid-nineteenth century relied on more than his facility with oil paint. Church also sketched in graphite, traced photographs, and undertook close collaborations with professional engravers and lithographers in order to reproduce his most acclaimed paintings. The varied effects Church could coax from oil paint are thus inextricable from his engagement with a range of materials and labor-intensive processes. Scientific imaging makes it possible to understand these complex material interactions more fully. This paper investigates two such examples, both of which introduced imagery inspired by the U.S. Civil War. Microscopic investigations of several artworks once thought to be oil-sketch variants of Church’s Our Banner in the Sky, 1861, have revealed that the works are actually impressions of the authorized lithograph that were hand-touched by Church using oil and gouache. In a second example, recent x-ray and infrared images of Church’s 1864 painting Our Flag have demonstrated the role of both the detailed graphite underdrawing and the layers of oil paint above it in creating its physically credible representation of the flag. In both instances, technical examinations help foreground the entanglement of process and product, pointing to Church’s insistence on maintaining a tactile engagement with his designs, even when mass-produced. Church offers but one example of the intermediality characteristic of the nineteenth century – where hand-tinted photographs, drawings translated into wood engravings, or prints based on photographs did not seem like material anomalies.