Niagara Falls by Moonlight
Frederic Edwin Church (American, 1826–1900)
probably 1856
Medium
graphite and white gouache
Dimensions
{"sheet":{"height":0.116,"width":0.164}}
Classification
Drawing
Department
Drawings
Museum
Cleveland Museum of Art
Credit
Gift of Robert Arthur Mann
Accession Number
1976.30
Tags
male
About this artwork
By the time Frederic E. Church executed this study of the Canadian side of Horseshoe Falls, Niagara Falls was already an icon of both American art and the American nation. Tourists and artists flocked to the falls in pursuit of a firsthand experience of the sublime, a sensation of elation and terror that portrayals of Niagara Falls had notorious difficulty reproducing. Church’s celebrated oil painting The Great Fall, Niagara (1857) was one of the few depictions believed to capture the fall’s pow...