About this work
The canvas opens on a lush equatorial jungle set against vast dark mountains receding to majestic, snow-capped peaks — and yet no single place on earth looks like this. The painting represents at least five different bio-regions of the Ecuadorian Andes, from the lush rainforest to the snow-capped peak of Mount Chimborazo.
Moving from the background forward, Church leads the viewer through a variety of topographical zones. A colonial Spanish hacienda appears in the central middle ground, resting on the banks of a river that flows to the right, eventually arriving at a waterfall on the right side of the painting.
Near the bottom left, a small ridge overlooks the waterfall, with a white cross standing upright on it. The blue sky above is filled with swirling gray clouds that seem to touch the mountaintops. The palette is warm, dominated by browns and greens, with the blue opening up in the upper left. Up close, the foreground is a different kind of spectacle entirely: specialists can identify more than 100 species of South American plants because Church depicted them so faithfully, and numerous animals and figures are woven into the details, including people visiting the cross in the left foreground.
The picture was inspired by Church's second trip to South America in the spring of 1857, during which he sketched prolifically throughout nine weeks in Ecuador.
The finished canvas was synthesized from scores of pencil and oil sketches and represents the full climatic range — from tropical to temperate to frigid — that Humboldt had observed there a half century earlier.
Church based the composition directly on Humboldt's 1805 Plant Geography Map, translating a scientific diagram of vertical climate zones into panoramic oil paint. Measuring more than five feet high and almost ten feet wide, its New York City exhibition in 1859 was a sensation, establishing Church as the foremost landscape painter in the United States.
The split between the humanities and the scientific worldview was nascent in 1859 — Charles Darwin's *On the Origin of Species* was published later in the same year — making this painting a rare artifact that sat at the exact fulcrum of that cultural moment. Church eventually sold the work for $10,000, at that time the highest price paid for a work by a living American artist, and it has been in the collection of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art since 1909.
As a print, *The Heart of the Andes* rewards rooms that can hold its ambition — a generous wall in a library, study, or living room where the eye has room to travel.
