I’ve suggested on several occasions that prior to the invention of movies as we know them, painters were the special effects wizards of their day, wowing the faithful (and cowing the doubtful) in church altarpieces and murals, and, in the 19th Century, displaying their detailed large scale works in theatrical settings, in some ways anticipating the appeal of images on a big movie screen.

A prime example of the latter is a painting by American painter Frederic Edwin Church that is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art titled Heart of the Andes.

Church created these large compositions not of a specific place, but as an aggregation of scenes he encountered and studied in his travels, in this case his second trip to South America.

The large scale painting, 66 x 119 inches (160 x 302cm), or almost 6ft x 10ft, was originally displayed in a dark gallery where it was reportedly lit by theatrical gas jet and reflector lighting and displayed in an elaborate frame, decked with curtains to create the impression of a view from a window. The room was supposedly further arranged with palm fronds and visitors were provided with opera glasses to view the painting’s details.

Patrons waited in line, over 12,000 of them, and paid twenty-five cents (probably the equivalent of $6 or $7 today) to view the painting.

Heart of the Andes was sold for $10,000.00, at the time the highest price for any work by a living American artist, and eventually donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The museum devoted a special exhibition to the painting in 1993 in which there was an attempt to replicate the setting of the original exhibit.

The Met’s pages for the painting includes one of its wonderful new high-resolution image files, that can be viewed or downloaded by clicking on the “Fullscreen” option under the small image. My detail crops above were taken from the high resolution image.

I came across the work of John Bonner through his Comic Crits — book reviews in the form of comic strips (see my previous post on Comic Crits).

Unfortunately the images of his work in his online gallery are frustratingly small, given the relatively large scale of his work. You can find somewhat larger images on the blog portion of the site, which serves as the home page.

His site gives no information on medium or size of the works. At first I thought he might be working at small scale in gouache, given his use of areas of relatively flat color. It was only through the website of a gallery in which he is represented, McGowan Fine Art in Concord , NH, that I found he is working in oil, commonly at sizes of 24×48′ (60x121cm) or 31×60″ (79x152cm), though he does work in smaller sizes as well.

There is also little biographical information on Bonner’s own site, I found from an article in the Concord Monitor (pop-up ad warning) that he was born in England and has been living in New England, specifically Massachusetts, since the 1980’s. There is also an article in Yankee Magazine (pop-over ad).

In addition to images of work in various stages, there is a series of short videos on his site that show a bit of his working process.

Bonner’s paintings frequently are of townscapes or buildings in landscapes, in which the architectural forms, as well as the forms of their shadows and negative shape sky elements, are arranged in strongly geometric compositions.