Which Hudson River School painting by Frederic Edwin Church is at the Met?

The Hudson River School painting by Frederic Edwin Church at the Met is The Heart of the Andes.

Church completed the enormous oil-on-canvas landscape in 1859 after traveling through Ecuador and Colombia. Rather than portraying one literal viewpoint, he combined observations of several Andean regions into an idealized panorama, including snow-capped Mount Chimborazo, tropical vegetation, a waterfall, a distant settlement, and a small cross.

The painting became a sensation when exhibited in New York in 1859. More than 12,000 people paid 25 cents to see it, often using opera glasses to inspect its minute details. Church eventually sold it for $10,000, then a record price for a work by a living American artist.

A common mix-up is The Icebergs, another major Church painting, but that work is associated with the Arctic and is held by the Dallas Museum of Art. The Heart of the Andes entered the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection in 1909.