He was promoted to full member the following year and began to take in his own students including Walter Launt Palmer, William James Stillman and Jervis McEntee.

This tradition carried on in the works of Church, who idealizes an uninterrupted nature, highlighted by his excruciatingly detailed art.

Church was the product of the second generation of the Hudson River School, a movement in American landscape art founded by his teacher Thomas Cole.

[7] Hudson River School paintings were characterized by their focus on traditional pastoral settings, especially the Catskill Mountains, and their Romantic qualities.

They attempted to capture the wild realism of an unsettled America that was quickly disappearing, and the appreciation of natural beauty.

His American frontier landscapes show the "expansionist and optimistic outlook of the United States in the mid-nineteenth century."

Kosmos, which Church owned, dedicated a chapter to landscape painting; Humboldt gave an important role to the visual artist in "scientifically" portraying the diversity of nature, especially in the New World.

[8] While Church's paintings were widely praised in the 1850s and 1860s, some critics found his detailed panoramas lacking in the imaginative or poetic.

Luminist art tends to emphasize horizontals, use non-diffuse light, and hide brushstrokes such that the painter's presence, or "personality", is less apparent to the viewer.

As his style progressed he departed from Cole's approach: he painted in more elaborate detail and his compositions became more adventurous in format, sometimes with dramatic light effects.

Church quickly earned a reputation as a traveler-artist, with early domestic painting and sketching trips to the White Mountains, western Massachusetts, the Catskills, Hartford, Conn, Niagara, Virginia, Kentucky, and Maine.

He made two trips to South America in 1853 and 1857 and stayed predominantly in Quito, visiting the volcanoes and cities of modern day Colombia and Ecuador, and crossing the isthmus of Panama.

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.

[11] When Church returned to South America in 1857 with painter Louis Rémy Mignot, he added to his sketches of the area.

The Heart of the Andes, Church's most famous painting, pictures several elements of topography combined into an idealistic, broad portrait of nature.

The painting was very large, yet highly detailed; every species of plant and animal is identifiable and numerous climate zones appear at once.

The audience sat on benches to view the piece, sometimes using opera glasses to get close, and Church strategically arranged the room to illuminate the painting with the light from overhead skylights.

Church eventually sold it for $10,000, at that time the highest price ever paid for a work by a living American artist.

In 1861, at the start of the Civil War, Church was inspired to paint Our Banner in the Sky by a sunset featuring red, white, and blue that he believed was a symbol that "the heavens indicated their support for the United States by reflecting the nation's colors in the setting sun".

He and his wife started a new family with the birth of Frederic Joseph in 1866, followed by Theodore Winthrop in 1869, Louis Palmer in 1870 and Isabel Charlotte ("Downie") in 1871.

Leaving his expanded family in Rome with friends, Frederic made a two-week visit to stay in Athens ended the journey in April 1869.

Richard Morris Hunt was consulted early on in the plans for the mansion at Olana, but after the Churches' trip, the English-born American architect Calvert Vaux was hired to complete the project.

[24] His wife Isabel had been ill for years, and she died on May 12, 1899, at the home of their late friend and patron, William H. Osborn, on Park Avenue in New York.

[27] Church's paintings, more confident and on a grander scale than those of his contemporaries, uniquely captured the spirit of an optimistic American people who associated the landscape of the New World with manifest destiny.

Art historian Barbara Novak wrote that Church was "a paradigm of the artist who becomes the public voice of a culture, summarizing its beliefs, embodying its ideas, and confirming its assumptions.

"[33] Olana State Historic Site is now owned and operated by the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation, Taconic Region, and with its curatorial work, visitor services, and external relations managed by The Olana Partnership, a private, non-profit organization.