Niagara Falls by Moonlight

A full moon casts a silvery path over the great falls, which pour between dark cliffs in this small study on paper. Frederic Edwin Church made the sheet in 1856, near the start of his rise to the foremost painter of the American landscape, and he returned often to Niagara over the following years. Worked in graphite with touches of white gouache to catch the moonlight, the sketch preserves an intimate, almost atmospheric vision of the cataract — a personal rehearsal for the monumental canvases that would make his name.