Vision of the Cross

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Artist: Frederic Edwin Church (American, 1826–1900)
Medium: Brush and oil paint on off-white paperboard
Size: 18 × 25.5 cm (7 1/16 × 10 1/16 in.)
Museum: Smithsonian Institution
Rights: CC0 — no rights reserved

Landscape sketch showing an imagined scene of a metaphorical landscape. Divided between a barren and a mountainous landscape, this work may be a continuation of Thomas Cole's unfinished "The Cross and the World" series, which symbolically represents the spiritual and earthly paths through life. Here, two figures walk beside each other in the foreground at lower right. Beyond them, an immense, craggy, and dark mountain range in the middle distance divides the composition between an empty and featureless landscape at left and a glowing, mountainous landscape at right.

Loosely rendered, the foreground appears to be covered in snow with a group of animals or perhaps bushes at lower left. This flat terrain gives way to an expansive, dark valley at left, above which a luminous Christian cross floats. Its blue glow illuminates the hazy, cloudy atmosphere around it. At right, warm, brown clouds hang above a golden glowing opening in what appears to be a dark, rugged mountain range. Natural features at right are broadly articulated.