Tropical Scenery

Tropical Scenery, at the Brooklyn Museum, dates to 1873 and shows Church continuing his exploration of Central and South American landscape in the period after his major expedition paintings had established his fame. The Brooklyn Museum's strong holdings of American nineteenth-century painting provide a natural context for this work, and its tropical subject matter reflects Church's conviction — shared with his teacher Thomas Cole and the Hudson River School broadly — that the landscape of the Americas was as worthy of monumental pictorial attention as the European scenery that dominated academic landscape tradition.

Church renders the tropical vegetation with his characteristic meticulous observation — individual plant species identifiable, the textures of leaf and bark described with botanical precision — while the overall composition achieves the dramatic luminous effect associated with his mature practice. The foreground flora is detailed and specific; the atmospheric middle and background distance becomes progressively more luminous and generalised.