Glorious Country: How the Artist Frederic Church Brought the World to America and America to the World

Historian and National Book Award finalist Johnson (American Eden) offers a superb biography of pioneering 19th-century landscape painter Frederic Church. Born in Hartford, Conn., in 1826, Church was 18 when he began apprenticing with landscape painter Thomas Cole, mastering “the many species of light that flourished around him” and developing an intense, dramatic style that stood out from the “bucolic, peaceful” paintings of his American peers. He soon rose to prominence in New York and Europe, challenging assumptions about the inferiority of American art. Drawing from Church’s letters, diaries, and artwork, the author documents his travels to such places as New Grenada (present-day Colombia), his views on nature as central to national identity and humanity, and his personal life, including the deaths of two of his children just days apart. Throughout, Johnson astutely analyzes how Church used nature to imagine and critique the nascent nation’s identity, celebrating American self-determination in Charter Oak, channeling the anxiety of a country on the brink of civil war in the “vertiginous” Niagara Falls, and subtly calling for unity with The Heart of the Andes, which depicts “frigid snowcapped peaks” (symbolizing the North) alongside “lush tropical lowlands” (symbolizing the South). It’s a vivid, transformational portrait of an artist who chronicled a nation in flux. (May)