Landscape Painting

Our Banner in the Sky, 1861
Object-Frederic Edwin Church, Our Banner in the Sky
Frederic Edwin Church is noted for creating landscape paintings that blend realistic detail with dramatic nationalism. Although it is a small-scale composition, Our Banner in the Sky boldly depicts the American flag as a transient arrangement of sky, clouds, and stars seemingly held aloft by the barren tree on the left. Church created an oil sketch that served as the basis for this work at the outbreak of the American Civil War (1861–65), following the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter, South Carolina, in April 1861. The flag, lowered to signal the Union’s surrender to rebel forces, soon became a contested national symbol. That June, Church was commissioned to produce a chromolithograph after his oil sketch, and the Terra Foundation’s version is one of several lithographs the artist himself presumably painted by hand. The work strongly resonated with Northern wartime viewers, who enthusiastically embraced this rallying image.
Learn more about this painting on the Terra Foundation website.
Our Banner in the Sky, 1861
Landscape Painting

Landscape with Figures: A Scene from "The Last of the Mohicans", 1826

The Promised Land - The Grayson Family, 1850

Almy Pond, Newport, c. 1857

Our Banner in the Sky, 1861

Rocks at Nahant, 1864

Autumn Afternoon, the Wissahickon, 1864

Brace's Rock, Brace's Cove, 1864

Hunter Mountain, Twilight, 1866

Morning in the Hudson, Haverstraw Bay, 1866

Paradise Valley, 1866–68

Newburyport Marshes: Approaching Storm, c. 1871

The Sidewheeler "The City of St. Paul" on the Mississippi River, Dubuque, Iowa, 1872

On the Hudson near Haverstraw, 1872

The Iceberg, c. 1875

Indian Encampment, c. 1870–76