About this work
*La Magdalena* is an oil on canvas measuring 28 by 42 inches, completed in 1854 — one of the earliest finished works Church produced after returning from the equatorial world that would define his career. The painting depicts a scene along the Magdalena River in Colombia , and it announces its subject with the kind of exacting particularity Church prized above all else. A contemporary reviewer praised it as a "most elaborate and apparently most truthful portraiture of that marvellous tropical vegetation, which bedecks the river-banks," and Church was particularly drawn to the immense trees with their spreading foliage. The composition follows a grammar Church would refine across his South American series: a palm tree — his most consistent trope in his South American landscapes — anchors one edge of the canvas, while boatmen appear in the foreground , dwarfed by the lush river-bank canopy rising around them. Church favored low horizontal lines and a preponderance of sky, and typically hid his brushstrokes so that the painting surface was smooth and the painter's "personality" seemingly absent. The effect is immersive: the viewer stands inside the tropics, not at a remove from them.
Church first went to South America in 1853 for almost seven months, working out his route from a trip up the Magdalena River to Honda and Bogotá, and then across the Andes to Quito and Guayaquil.
The first trip was with businessman Cyrus West Field, who financed the voyage hoping to use Church's paintings to lure investors to his South American ventures. But Church's own ambitions ran deeper than commerce. He was inspired by Alexander von Humboldt's exploration of the continent in the early 1800s; after Humboldt's *Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America* was published in
