Afterglow: Frederic Church and the Landscape of Memory

An examination of landscape as a vehicle for expressing love, loss, and healing.

Afterglow brings together the known memorial paintings by Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900) for the first time, unveiling how Church returned to the medium of landscape throughout his career to create solace in times of loss. This book presents new scholarship on the memorial functions of landscape in nineteenth-century America through the lens of the distinctive oeuvre of the era’s foremost landscape painter.

Allegra K. Davis examines Church’s memorial paintings as a group within the context of the period’s material culture of mourning and sanctuary landscapes such as rural cemeteries. In doing so she illuminates the iconography and practices Church embraced, both in his paintings and in the creation of his home, Olana, to give voice to loss. An additional essay by Rebecca Bedell contextualizes the sentimental and therapeutic aspects of landscape painting and design in nineteenth-century American art.

Allegra K. Davis is associate curator for the Olana Partnership at Olana State Historic Site in New York.