Sketches of Buildings in Mexico

Frederic Edwin Church, the preeminent American landscape painter of the nineteenth century, traveled extensively throughout Mexico to document its architecture and terrain. These quick pen sketches capture humble structures—a modest dwelling with a domed oven, a fortified building, and rural domestic arrangements—rendered with the observational economy characteristic of an artist's working studies. Church's journeys to Mexico, like his earlier expeditions to South America, fueled his monumental studio paintings and reflect the nineteenth-century aesthetic fascination with picturesque vernacular forms and distant geographies.