Morning Thanks--Microsoft

A great part of the allure of this famous painting, The Heart of the Andes (1859), by Frederic Edwin Church, is its size. This massive canvas is five feet tall and ten feet wide. Who could guess the immensity of the area Mr. Church wanted to cover; in the distance, the top of the mountain has to be at least fifty miles away.

The painting showed up on a screen saver put up in front of me by Microsoft, this huge and muchly famous work of art meant to attract my attention as it most certainly did. I'd never seen it before, nor heard of Frederic Edwin Church, which is not to say there's nothing familiar about it.  What's familiar is that the artist, or so I've read, was part of what's called, in American Art, the Hudson River School, which wasn't a building but a way of looking at art that emphasizes the sheer glory of nature, especially as it exists in places rarely seen. 

The headmaster, so to speak, of the Hudson River School was a man named Thomas Cole, whose breathtaking landscape artistry is very familiar. Here's The Ox-Bow. Then again, even if isn't familiar, even if you've never seen a Thomas Cole, you'll easily recognize this painting as being a cousin--not all that distant either--of Church's famous Andes.

Both try to gather the world itself into the sprawling borders. Both rely almost exclusively on the immensity of nature to stun the viewer. Both are not one bit ashamed of your oohing and aahing, in fact they both really want you speechless. When The Heart of the Andes "opened" in a gallery in New York, those who entered into its presence paid a quarter each (Church made some good money by charging admission) and were loaned opera glasses so they could examine the massive landscape whose exacting detail was beyond anything anyone had ever seen. 

I've been reading an old (1915) biography of Father De Smet (The Life of Father De Smet, S. J.: Apostle of the Rocky Mountains, 1801-1873), who is without a doubt the most beloved Roman Catholic missionary of the 19th century. Just one of the reasons his face graces lots and lots of stained glass windows throughout the west, especially on reservations, is that he was often among the earliest palefaces to walk or ride into the camp of thousands of Native peoples. He put on miles that make Paul's missionary travels look like afternoon hikes, and what he found out west was a land that looked much like that offered for our joy in paintings like these. 

You can't help but feel a little of the 19th century's Manifest Destiny here, the absolutist faith that the vast empire of the west is all, well, ours. We found it and it's ours to claim, even if it wasn't, even if right up the road from where I live, once upon a time a city of 15000 Native people was prospering along the Big Sioux River. No matter. White folks couldn't help thinking that God himself had served up this immense blessing, this new world, just for us, for white people--that's part of what's there on the canvases of the Hudson River School.

It's hard to spot on the tiny rendition of Church's huge canvas, but if you look down in the bottom left, you'll see a white cross and two individuals at the end of a well-worn path that begins off the painting. If you were standing in front of the painting itself, a pair of opera glasses held up to your eyes, you would see it clearly. Trust me, in any print larger than what you see on this post, that white cross manages to wrest our attention, in part because of the darkness behind it. You really can't miss it. 

Frederic Edwin Church was a pious member of a New York Dutch Reformed Church. He thought like a Calvinist, invested his faith in a sovereign God, which made it was impossible for him to look at an immeasurable landscape like this and not see some semblance of the Creator of Heaven and Earth.

When Microsoft put the painting up on my screen, I couldn't help notice that little cross. It's small, but proudly situated on the canvas; and I couldn't help wonder why the artist insisted on it, why it had to be there, why he couldn't leave well enough alone and just glory in creation. The Heart of the Andes wouldn't be any less impressive if there'd been no cross.

I can't help but think that he and my mother shared a common spiritual discipline. She didn't know a bull from a cow, but when she would spot a herd of cattle over the kind of hills that surround the Missouri River, she'd quote scripture, sure as anything, just one line: "the cattle over a thousand hills." She'd say it in a deepened breath of reverie. The immensity she couldn't help seeing prompted nothing less than a vision of the greater immensity of God.

I can't help but think Church was insistent on the cross--same impulse. 

And I've got it too, I suppose. That's why I can't help telling you all of this. 

This morning I'm thankful for Microsoft.