Cotacachi from Otavalo, Ecuador

Frederic Edwin Church's sketch of Cotacachi volcano demonstrates the Hudson River School artist's documentary approach to South American landscapes. Church traveled throughout Ecuador and Colombia in the early 1850s, producing detailed studies that would inform his monumental finished paintings. This drawing, with its notational quality and the artist's handwritten reminder about light effects and foreground vegetation, captures the working method of nineteenth-century landscape painters who synthesized careful observation with romantic sensibility. Church's expeditionary work established him as America's preeminent painter of the equatorial sublime.