Cerro Negro from Laguna Mojanda, Ecuador

Frederic Edwin Church's sketch captures the volcanic peak of Cerro Negro rising above Ecuador's Laguna Mojanda during his South American expedition. Church, a leading figure of the Hudson River School, traveled throughout the Andes to study dramatic mountain landscapes firsthand. His expeditions generated hundreds of sketches that served as studies for monumental oil paintings exhibited in New York and Boston. This rapid pen-and-ink notation demonstrates the artist's method of recording geological forms and atmospheric conditions in the field—essential research that informed his visionary landscape compositions celebrating the sublime power of untamed nature.