Norton Bush (1834–1894), United States
The Heart of the Peruvian Andes—A View from the Arequipa Valley with Mount Chachani in the Distance, Peru, 1877
Oil on canvas
Colección Patricia Phelps de CisnerosNorton Bush traveled to Peru in 1875 at the invitation of Henry Meiggs, a U.S. mining magnate, who commissioned Bush to produce a series of paintings of the Andean cordillera, including the Heart of the Peruvian Andes. Bush was influenced by Frederic Edwin Church’s famous work Heart of the Andes (1859; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), which was extremely well known at that time in the United States. Bush’s painting of rugged mountains and lush vegetation show a spectacular and Edenic landscape, exemplifying picturesque conventions that would have appealed to U.S. collectors.