El Rio de Luz (Spanish for The River of Light; also known as Morning in the Tropics) is an 1877 oil painting by American landscape artist Frederic Edwin Church.

While a high degree of realism and attention to detail remains, the landscape in The River of Light is more local; it no longer attempts to capture numerous topographies or climate zones in one image.

The National Gallery of Art notes that "the tightly focused realism, the overall tonal harmony and restrained coloration, and the compositional unity all lend a remarkable cohesiveness to the work".

Details include a canoeist, a flock of birds over the river and two others (possibly the amethyst woodstar hummingbird[1]) perched close to the viewer, and a hut on the right bank.

Huntington finds in the painting the influence of Gustave Doré's prints for Paradise Lost, of engravings after J. M. W. Turner such as Bacchus and Ariadne, and illustrated books on the tropics, such as those by Paul Marcoy.