Church in Barranquilla, Colombia

Frederic Edwin Church's watercolor documents colonial religious architecture in northern Colombia during the artist's travels through South America. The whitewashed church with its distinctive bell tower and red-tiled roofs sits isolated on arid ground, rendered with precise topographic detail characteristic of nineteenth-century landscape documentation. A mounted figure traverses the foreground, emphasizing the remote setting. Church's expeditions through Ecuador, Colombia, and Peru generated thousands of sketches that informed his monumental Hudson River School paintings and established him as America's preeminent landscape painter of exotic territories.