English: Frederic Edwin Church, American, 1826–1900

Passing Shower in the Tropics, 1872 Oil on canvas 31 x 51 cm. (12 3/16 x 20 1/16 in.) frame: 41.8 × 62.5 × 3.1 cm (16 7/16 × 24 5/8 × 1 1/4 in.) Museum purchase y1945-212

Frederic Church was the primary pupil of the Hudson River School’s founder, Thomas Cole, who imparted to his technically gifted student the notion of landscape painting as a vehicle for conveying ideas about history, divinity, and the human condition. These concepts were complemented by the writings of naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, whose Cosmos inspired Church to visit South America in search of sublime subject matter with which to express his pantheistic apprehension of the natural world. Church produced a series of spectacular paintings of tropical scenes that combine accurate detail, proposing and offering revelation through scientific knowledge. Passing Shower in the Tropics, a modestly scaled iteration of these South American subjects, shares with other, later examples of the type a focus on atmospheric effects and the apparent representation of an amalgam of locations rather than a single particular site.