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Frederick Church is a US landscape painter, who spent quite a lot of time
traveling to the South America and whose paintings are mostly landscapes in the
Andes Mountains.
"Cotopaxi, 1862" is such a master piece that had stunned
the world as well as it can be regarded as a major milestone in the history of
landscape paintings. As we have seen, most landscape painters have been trying
to depict pastoral scenes, grandeur of mountains and valley. Examples even
include his other works such the one below entitled as "The Morning in
Tropics". But seldom do we see paintings like this, which strikes hard
in our mind and soul by depicting the barren, violence, untamed wildness, and
melancholy through an actively erupting volcano. Cotopaxi is one of highest
peaks in Andes Mountains in South America and has been a well-known active
volcano. It violently erupted in 1862. In the picture, the erupted smoke from
Cotopaxi darkened majority of sky and the setting sun painted through the smoke
on the earth with bloody red color, reflecting on the surface of a quiet and
lonely lake. A burning and violent tone and a heavy sigh of melancholy. It is
probably the only landscape art work in human history that can be summarized as
"heart-shaking".
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