Temples of Hera I and II, Paestum, Italy

Frederic Edwin Church's sketch captures the ancient Greek temples at Paestum in southern Italy, rendered in quick pen strokes across the horizontal format. Two Doric structures dominate the composition, their fluted columns and entablatures reduced to essential linear marks. Church's notational approach—with scattered architectural details and landscape elements sketched in the margins—reveals the artist's working method during travel. The drawing exemplifies nineteenth-century artistic practice: on-site observation feeding ambitious landscape paintings. Church's monumental canvases of American and international sites established him as a leading figure in the Hudson River School, translating such studies into grand historical compositions that merged geology, archaeology, and Romantic vision.