Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900) was an American landscape painter and the most celebrated member of the second generation of the Hudson River School, known for paintings of staggering scale and ambition that carried American landscape art to a global audience. A student of Thomas Cole, he traveled throughout North and South America, to the Arctic, to Jamaica, and to the Near East in search of subjects that could match his desire for panoramic grandeur, producing canvases — Niagara, The Heart of the Andes, Twilight in the Wilderness — that drew crowds of thousands when they were exhibited in New York, with viewers paying admission to stand before a single painting. His sense of light is theatrical and otherworldly: sunsets build from the horizon like slow explosions, Arctic ice catches fire, tropical vegetation pulses with a greenness that seems charged. After his death his reputation ebbed and then powerfully recovered, and he is now understood as one of the essential figures in the history of American art.