In Glorious Country, the historian explores the life, work, and legacy of 19th-century American landscape painter Frederic Church.

What inspired you to write this biography?

In college, I was exposed to Church’s art in a survey of the Hudson River School, but I didn’t love his paintings. Fast-forward and one of the trustees of Church’s house museum saw me give a talk and said I might want to think of writing about Church—there’s no biography of him, and he lived an incredible life. I looked at his papers and found he was incredibly witty. He had a gift for friendship. He was brave and had drive and curiosity, along with a talent that people thought was almost supernatural. His sense of humor was not what I expected, given the grandiosity of his art. I wondered what these two strands were doing in one person and where he fit in the evolution of American culture and politics.

Can you describe your research process?

I began by working through 7,000 pages of correspondence to Church, from Church, and mentioning Church, as well as the historical work on him. Once I had his voice in my head, I started traveling to different landscapes to retrace as many of his steps as I could to see what he saw, and how he translated that to the canvas.

Do you have a favorite Church painting?

Twilight in the Wilderness, a painting of a sunset over a lake drawn from Church’s travels through Maine, captures his two main commitments better than any other work. The first is celebrating the natural beauty of North America in an effort to prove that the United States was not a savage land—a word used by European critics. Secondly, it was painted as the United States was careening toward the Civil War, and captures how Church got increasingly concerned and lost some of the optimism of his earlier paintings. At the same time, he heeded an Emersonian recommendation to use elements of nature as an artistic language. Twilight is a contained wilderness scene that creates a feeling of anxiety about the fate of the nation.

What is Church’s legacy?

Church is the right artist to be celebrating in the 250th year of the nation. It’s also the 200th anniversary of his birth. Church put American painting on the map at a time when it was looked down upon. But, just as importantly, later in his life he began to travel and focus on the people and the architecture of places that were foreign to him. He became open to the idea that even though we can be proud to be from this young nation, that doesn’t preclude admiration for what the rest of the world has accomplished—that those two thoughts can be held at the same time.