View of the Sabaneta, Ecuador

Frederic Edwin Church's pencil sketch captures a South American landscape during his travels through Ecuador and Colombia. The composition features tropical vegetation—palms and ferns rising vertically—rendered with Church's characteristic attention to botanical detail. Dated in the artist's hand, this study exemplifies the working method of Hudson River School painters, who sketched directly from nature to gather material for large exhibition canvases. Church's expeditions to South America, undertaken in the 1850s, yielded sketches that he developed into monumental paintings celebrating the sublime American landscape, both north and south.