The Heart of the Andes

Frederic Edwin Church did not sign The Heart of the Andes in a corner. He carved his name into the trunk of the tree in the foreground, the way a traveller carves initials into an actual tree. The signature is picked out by a specific shaft of light, deliberately findable if you look for it. Church spent two long trips in the Andes of Ecuador in the 1850s, sketching plants, mountains, weather, animals. The finished painting is a composite of everything he saw, stitched into one imaginary valley. A well-worn footpath at the left leads to two figures kneeling at a small wooden cross. The wilderness in this painting is not empty. It is full of human traces, and one of them is the painter. Now at Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York @metmuseum