Church of Guapulo, Quito, Ecuador

Frederic Edwin Church's sketch of the Church of Guapulo demonstrates the Hudson River School's fascination with South American landscape and architecture. This preliminary drawing captures the church's distinctive dome and towers nestled within mountainous terrain, rendered in Church's characteristic linear style. The composition balances architectural specificity with atmospheric perspective, showing how nineteenth-century American landscape painters studied foreign sites to expand their visual vocabulary. Such sketches functioned as source material for larger exhibition paintings, transforming firsthand observation into monumental canvases that brought distant geographies to American audiences.