Word: humboldt
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Church's desire to go south was sparked by his reading the German explorer and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859), who had traveled in Central and South America at the turn of the century. Humboldt was not only a scientist but a great popularizer. As Stephen Jay Gould points out in an excellent catalog essay, the first two volumes of his work Cosmos were seen by their 19th century public as the last word on nature and its origins. Humboldt's ideas were what Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species overthrew. For Humboldt, like Linnaeus before...
...century abounds in attempted marriages between science and art, but none of them have had the intensity and completeness with which Church absorbed Humboldt's ideas, acted on them and gave them pictorial form. In a sense he did indeed become, as the New York Times announced in 1863, "the artistic Humboldt of the New World," come to fulfill Humboldt's prophecy that "landscape painting will flourish with a new and hitherto unknown brilliancy when artists . . . shall be enabled, in the interior of continents, in the humid valleys of the tropical world, to seize with genuine freshness . . . on the true...