Exploring Ecuador

The mountain called Cotopaxi, painted by Frederic Edwin Church, is in the Andes of Ecuador in northwestern South America.

Cotopaxi soars almost 20,000 feet above sea level. Through the teachings of the great German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, whose extensive South American explorations and publications awakened the outside world to the wonders of the American tropics, its status as the highest active volcano on earth was well known to the audience gathered at Goupil's Gallery.

"The form of Cotopaxi is the most beautiful and regular of the colossal summits of the high Andes," Humboldt had written, but it "is also the most dreadful volcano of the kingdom of Quito, and its explosions the most frequent and disastrous."

Humboldt's description of its exotic beauty and latent powers of destruction proved fascinating to Church, who drew and painted it frequently. Church's interest in the subject was so closely linked with the great explorer's name that upon the exhibition of Cotopaxi in 1863, it was announced that he had vindicated "his claim to be considered as the artistic Humboldt of the new world."

To view other landscape paintings online, visit our virtual exhibition Panoramas: The North American Landscape in Art.

Source: Katherine Manthorne. Creation & Renewal: Views of Cotopaxi by Frederic Edwin Church (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press for the National Museum of American Art, 1985).

Pictured: Frederic Edwin Church, 1826–1900, Cotopaxi, 1855, oil, 28 x 42 1/8 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mrs. Frank R. McCoy.