El Rio de Luz

El Rio de Luz (The River of Light)
Artist Frederic Edwin Church
Year 1877
Medium oil on canvas
Dimensions 138.1 cm × 213.7 cm (54.4 in × 84.1 in)
Location National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

El Rio de Luz (Spanish for The River of Light; also known as Morning in the Tropics) is an 1877 oil painting by American landscape artist Frederic Edwin Church. It is his last large-scale painting of South America, following pieces such as The Andes of Ecuador (1855) and The Heart of the Andes (1859). Like them, the painting is a composite of the many sketches and drawings Church made while traveling in South America. The NGA notes that "the tightly focused realism, the overall tonal harmony and restrained coloration, and the compositional unity all lend a remarkable cohesiveness to the work."

Church's once-stellar reception by the 1970s had diminished; his work was often criticized for an excess of detail and a sense of melodrama. Contemporary art critic William Crary Brownell called it "a magnificent drop-curtain. A drop-curtain may be the work of incontestable genius; it may have a thousand merits; ... it is simply not painting."[1] In the 1960s, as Church was being rediscovered as an important American painter, David Huntington called the painting "Church's last and perhaps greatest psychic landscape".[2]

The work differs in important ways from Church's monumental South American canvases of the past. While a high degree of realism and attention to detail remains, the landscape in The River of Light is more local; it no longer attempts to capture numerous topographies or climate zones in one image. As a result, the composition is more cohesive and intimate. The vantage point is no longer high and detached, but seemingly low enough that a viewer might stand there.

The painting was exhibited at the 1878 Exposition Universelle.

William Earl Dodge, Jr. (1832–1903) was the first owner of the work and passed it to his descendants. In 1965, it was given to the Preservation Society of Newport County, Rhode Island, and purchased in December 1965 by the National Gallery of Art. The painting was restored in 1988.

References

Notes
  1. ↑ Kelly, 64
  2. ↑ Kelly, 64
Sources
  • Kelly, Franklin (1996). American Paintings of the Nineteenth Century, Part I. National Gallery of Art/Oxford University Press. pp. 63–68. ISBN 0-89468-215-6.
  • El Rio de Luz (The River of Light) at NGA
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