Frederic Edwin Church is having a scholarly moment. From the evidence of numerous papers at the 2016 annual meeting of the College Art Association and a raft of recent publications, Church is the member of the so-called “Hudson river school” whose work is most responsive to current academic approaches. Jennifer Raab's Frederic Church: The Art and Science of Detail is the most visible product of this renaissance in Church studies. This is primarily a work of sustained, eloquent, evocative, and effective visual analysis, in which the author looks closely at iconic works like The Heart of the Andes (1859) that are otherwise difficult to see for their familiarity. This edifice of observation rests upon a foundation of both primary-source research and readings in natural science and literary theory. While one sometimes wishes the perspective could have been broadened beyond the characteristic structures and methods of a dissertation book, it does make a significant contribution to a revival of scholarly attention to Church's work in the context of nineteenth-century popular and scientific culture.

The book centers on the problem of “seeing in detail”: how the conspicuous, performative minuteness of Church's canvases acts upon the viewer and requires that viewer to act in return (2). Raab offers a compelling account of Church's oeuvre as an art the merit of which is founded upon the intrepid journeys, diligent studies, and painstaking execution of the painter rather than the poetic suggestiveness of his brush. Indeed, this body of work challenged period expectations, better fulfilled in the work of Church's teacher Thomas Cole, perhaps, that a work of landscape painting would produce a harmonious and evocative overarching effect without becoming bogged down in the details. By skillful deployment of popular culture and reception history throughout, Raab encourages her reader to think about the pleasure and knowledge Church's paintings transmitted for period audiences, even if they speak rather differently today.

The seven short chapters each center upon a single artwork and the strategies of detail within: Niagara (1857), The Andes of Ecuador (1855), The Heart of the Andes (1859), The Icebergs (1861), The Vale of St. Thomas, Jamaica (1867), El Khasné, Petra (1874), and Church's country house Olana (begun 1870). Raab describes the stakes of assimilating the details of sectional difference on the verge of the Civil War, the distinct ways of perceiving detail under the systems of Charles Darwin and Alexander von Humboldt, the moral implications of detail for a nascent consumer culture, the emotional and ideological uses of absent detail, and the ways in which working with nature's details in earth, water, and brick and not on canvas alone could also be a form of landscape art. While certain of these moves risk oversimplification – explaining away an object through a single contemporary text rather than welcoming complexity and contradiction – the accounts Raab offers are largely compelling and convincing, and the example she offers of the continuing value of paintings as a kind of archival evidence is especially useful. One wishes for a more extensive treatment of contemporary visual entertainments – stereoscopes, for example, make a fleeting appearance at the very end of chapter 3 (83–84) – and for deeper engagement with the affective functions of detail when citing numerous primary sources that offer a vivid depiction of the painful, even nightmarish, experience of looking at a Church. Amidst these small complaints, Raab is a leader in taking Olana seriously as a work of landscape art that has much to tell about Church's better-known works in oil on canvas, although it would perhaps be more useful to look back to previous painter–architects rather than forward to Robert Smithson, which produces an unhelpful claim that Church is an earthwork artist avant la lettre (182). An epilogue makes more effective use of modern and contemporary parallels through the preservation history of Olana and its impact on Dan Flavin.

It is deserving of particular mention that this is one of the most beautifully designed and lavishly illustrated scholarly books in recent memory, making accessible in high-quality color reproductions some lesser known works on paper in the collections of the Olana State Historic Site. Because of the work of the designers at Yale University Press, and the generosity of subventions, this will be a valued reference for years to come and Raab is to be thanked for her role in launching a renewal of Church studies.