Canyon Cleft near El Khasné, Petra, Jordan

Frederic Edwin Church's sketch captures the towering sandstone formations of Petra's canyon with rapid, gestural pen strokes. Church traveled to the Middle East in 1868, following the tradition of nineteenth-century landscape painters seeking exotic subjects. This working drawing—annotated with color notations and compositional studies—reveals the artist's method of gathering visual material for studio paintings. Church's expeditions to remote locations and his translation of landscape into monumental canvases made him central to American landscape painting's expansion beyond native terrain.