Fire & Ice

Frederic Church (1826-1900), who gained international renown for paintings such as Niagara (1857), The Heart of the Andes (1859), Twilight in the Wilderness (1860), and The Icebergs (1861), was inspired by his extensive travel and study. His work was also informed by his appreciation of a new visual medium. Fire & Ice, a selection from the several thousand photographs and daguerreotypes Church collected at Olana, his Orientalist home on the Hudson River, provides insight into the interests and taste of one of nineteenth-century America's greatest painters.

Thomas Weston Fels is an independent curator and writer and curator of the Elizabeth de C. Wilson Museum, Manchester, Vermont. He has worked as consultant and guest curator to a number of museums, Among his many exhibitions and publications is O Say Can You See: American Photographs, 1839-1939. In 1986 he was named a Chester Dale Fellow of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and in 1998-99 a Fletcher Jones Fellow of the Huntington Library. Kevin J. Avery is an associate curator in the Department of American Paintings and Sculpture of The Metropolitan Museum of Art and an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Art at Hunter College, City University of New York. He is the author of Church's Great Picture: The Heart of the Andes, which accompanied an exhibition of the same title at the Metropolitan in 1993, and of numerous catalogue essays and articles on the subject of nineteenth-century American landscape painting The Dahesh Museum of Art is the only arts institution in America devoted to the academic art of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Especially strong in French and British art of the later nineteenth century, its collection offers an overview of an entire epoch and reflects the entry of American artists into this important tradition