As Susan Sontag once observed, great writers are either husbands or lovers: on one side, “reliability, intelligibility, generosity, decency,” she yawns; on the other, lovers — ah, lovers!
Frederic Edwin Church, the 19th-century American painter, belonged to a different order entirely. He had the solid virtues of a husband, yet none of the dullness Sontag’s remark suggests — an artist who paid the bills and picked up the kids, but never lost the charge of the sexy swashbuckler.
His wife Isabel may at times have wished for a little less of that adventurous spirit: fewer scrambles up the sides of angry Andean volcanoes, fewer leaky boats balanced on the edge of Arctic icebergs, fewer narrow escapes from armed Bedouin tribes. Those exploits only deepen the sense that Church was as daring as he was dependable.
It is therefore remarkable that he has never, until now, been the subject of a proper biography. Victoria Johnson’s Glorious Country (2026) arrives as a long-overdue account of an artist whose life was as vivid as his work.
The result is a nuanced tribute to an inspired and inspiring man, and one that makes the wait feel justified.
