Jennifer Raab

The landscapes of Frederic Edwin Church are defined by an evolving language of detail. My dissertation examines this evolution, tracing a shift from a system of representation based on comprehensive knowledge to one marked by a diffusion of information. While “knowledge” implied the pursuit of order and unity for nineteenth-century viewers, “information”—a word increasingly used as the century continued—made no such promises. Church’s works exist between these paradigms. I focus on four major paintings in relation to an emerging Darwinian discourse, changes in viewing and exhibition practices, new methods of consumer display, and the pressures of photographic veracity on painting.