Frederic Edwin Church proves that Cotopaxi isn’t the name of ridiculously overpriced activewear for no reason.

Cotopaxi is an Ecuadorian volcano in the Andes mountains and is located a nerve-wracking thirty-seven miles away from the country’s capital, Quito. Now, it’s no surprise that volcanoes erupt; it’s what they do. But Cotopaxi is a stratovolcano, a type of volcano that can erupt thousands of times over its millions of years in existence. It’s also part of the “Ring of Fire.” No, not that song by Johnny Cash. It's the hundreds of active volcanoes that surround the Pacific Ocean. But this is just the sort of danger and majesty that drew the Romantics to such scenes of natural wonder.

As a member of the second generation of Hudson River School painters, Church wasn’t afraid to stray from the scenic Hudson Valley in search of a nice vista elsewhere. Influenced by the German explorer and writer Alexander von Humboldt’s hippie-dippy philosophy about the interconnectedness of nature, he went to Ecuador in search of scenes that demonstrated the Earth's divine power. He traveled to this region of South America multiple times, making his first trip in 1853. During these trips, Church made sketches to prepare for as many as ten later paintings of the mighty volcano. He painted this view in 1857, just before his second trip south. 

Like many other artists belonging to the Romantic movement, Church contemplated the idea of the sublime in nature. It’s easy to imagine yourself as the small figure in the lower right corner, marveling at the view. Although smaller, this figure recalls the Rückenfigur (the compositional device of depicting a figure from behind) of the Caspar David Friedrich’s work Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, which was later interpreted by Glenn Ligon in 2009.

Much like Emanuel Leutze’s work Washington Crossing the Delaware, Cotopaxi is full of lies. Church exaggerated the volcano’s shape, creating a perfectly painted cone. More importantly, the real Cotopaxi is in a barren landscape, not surrounded by the beautiful vegetation that he painted. In a classic Church move, he invented the landscape around the volcano to create what he thought would be an ideal image. Unfortunately, this cognitive dissonance was of the same kind that fueled the imperialist point of view that insisted this land was ripe for the taking.