Frederic Edwin Church, 1826-1900, was a great American landscape painter of the Hudson River School. He was born in Hartford, Connecticut, and studied painting locally during his early years. At the age of 18, he was accepted at the Hudson River school as the only student of Thomas Cole. Church's father referred to his son's paintings as merely "business". To Church , they were certainly more than that, but his works became quite popular and he did make wonderful business. In fact, he was one of the nation's wealthiest artists, owning about half a million dollars at the time of his death. The National Academy of Design and the American Art Union were some of the first buyers of his paintings.
Church preferred exotic landscapes, unlike his contemporaries who loved to paint in Europe. Church paid two visits to Equador, once in 1852 and once in 1857 and did several paintings on South American landscapes, including Cotopaxi. Later, Church made an expedition to Labrador. There he did various sketches of the white landscape of ice. His painting, The Icebergs, was purchased in 1863. Finally, Church took the popular jouney to Europe in 1869. While he was in the area he visited Jerusalem, Damascus, Constantinople and the Black Sea, for their more unsual and interesting landscapes. Despite all this travel, Church's most famous painting was done in North America of the Niagara Falls