Niagara Falls by Moonlight (probably 1856): Art, History and Details

Niagara Falls by Moonlight (probably 1856) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Frederic Edwin Church (American, 1826–1900).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

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 power in pictorial terms. Like many artists of the Hudson River School, Church used drawings made on site to preserve the visual memory of the place he intended to paint in oil. Cleveland’s sheet was possibly executed during one of the four trips he took to the falls in 1856 to prepare for Niagara. As a night scene, this study in light and shadow is unusual among Church’s drawings. The dark brown paper enhances the image’s nocturnal quality and allowed Church to render the atmospheric effects of mist and clouds. He used white gouache not only as a highlight, but also to define the luminous forms of water and vapor, crafting the landscape’s substance out of negative and positive space. On the picture’s left-hand side, Church represented the man-made Terrapin Tower in shadowy miniature, a testament to his interest in site-specific details—and also, perhaps, a reminder of the diminutive status of human creation in the face of awesome natural forces.

Object facts

• Title: Niagara Falls by Moonlight
• Date: probably 1856
• Creator attribution: Frederic Edwin Church (American, 1826–1900)
• Culture: America
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: graphite and white gouache
• Dimensions: Sheet: 11.6 x 16.4 cm (4 9/16 x 6 7/16 in.)
• Collection: DR - American 19th Century
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 1976.30

A detail from the museum

In this drawing, Church manipulates negative space—the space around and between his drawn subjects—to suggest the forms of water and smoke.

Collection credit

Gift of Robert Arthur Mann

Further reading listed by the museum

• Foster, Carter E., "Drawing Power", Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland Art: The Cleveland Museum of Art Members Magazine. Vol. 38 no. 04, April 1998

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.