On May 4, 1826, the great American landscape painter Frederic Edwin Church was born to a wealthy Hartford family. The Church family’s success in industry and insurance allowed Frederic to pursue an art career. When he was eighteen he began studying with master painter Thomas Cole and was still in his 20s when he sold a painting to the newly established Wadsworth Atheneum. A leader of what was called the Hudson River School of landscape painters, Church was hugely successful during his life for his work, which was drawn from life but also contained what he called “a spiritual dimension.” Though he died in April 1900 at his Persian-style mansion Olana near the Hudson River in New York, Church is buried in Hartford, in Spring Grove Cemetery.
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