This is one of the most important American landscape paintings in any European public collection yet for almost a century its significance was overlooked and it languished out of sight. It was restored to view in 1980, reflecting a wider revival of British interest in American nineteenth-century landscape painting, and is now among the most popular works in the Scottish National Gallery.

Frederic Edwin Church was a pupil of Thomas Cole, the founder of the Hudson River School which was the first truly American school of painting. Described by his teacher as having ‘the finest eye for drawing in the world’, Church based his landscapes on studies and drawings made from nature on trips across North and South America. His finished paintings combine a feeling for scientific detail with impressive scale. Dramatically lit and theatrically presented, they caused a sensation when displayed to the public on both sides of the Atlantic.

Situated on the border between the United States and Canada, the Niagara Falls was an obvious subject for artists seeking to convey the physical power, scale and spectacular beauty of the American continent. Church visited the falls on several occasions and they appear in at least twenty of his paintings and studies. The only study for this vast picture is a small sepia photograph which the artist painted over in oils, perhaps when he visited the site in 1856. In his finished composition he eliminates walkways, fences, boats and any of the other signs of the tourist industry that were a familiar part of the popular Niagara Falls experience then as now. Instead he takes us to the very brink of the cataract; we look across to Goat Island and beyond to the famous horseshoe falls on the Canadian side. The small, rickety viewing platform at the left is the artist’s invention and the tiny figures (said to be his friend the sculptor Erastus Dow Palmer and the latter’s daughter Madeleine) serve to emphasise the overwhelming power of the cascading water.

This painting was originally commissioned by the New York dealer Michael Knoedler and was intended as one of the exhibits to represent the newly United States of America at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1867. The choice of this symbolic national landmark would have carried political as well as artistic significance, projecting an image of unbridled power and self-confidence to the wider world in the aftermath of the American Civil War. In the end, Church sent an earlier view of Niagara Falls to the Paris exhibition and our picture was shown in London where the crowds marvelled at the illusionistic rendering of light and the evocation of the sound and fury of the waterfalls. The painting was later purchased by John Stewart Kennedy, a Scottish-born businessman who had made his fortune in supplying coal and steel to the railroad industry and later as a banker in New York. Kennedy became a prominent philanthropist and it seems that he purchased this painting with the express purpose of gifting it to the Scottish people.

This text was originally published in 100 Masterpieces: National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, 2015.