Graphic Making, Actuarial Knowing: Transfer and Countertransference in Frederic Edwin Church’s South American Drawings

American painter Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900) is best known for his monumental landscapes of icebergs, waterfalls, equatorial jungles, and other far-flung sights: oil paintings typically composed in his New York studio, based on detailed drawings made in situ. This article examines the techniques of making and knowing engineered into those information-laden drawings, images built in anticipation of metropolitan reuse. Against the kaleidoscopic, polychromatic richness of Church’s exhibition paintings, the graphic production examined here now exists only as negative photostats. Reckoning with that reproductive transfer sits at the heart of this article. Engaging with such thick mediation offers new insight into Church’s pragmatic encounters with South American targets in the 1850s, I argue, just as it foregrounds the painter’s complex enmeshment in an expanding insurance industry rooted in his native Hartford, Connecticut. But it also serves to clarify the methodological patterns by which art-historical logic makes and knows its objects