On February 6, 2013, the National Gallery in London opened Through American Eyes: Frederic Church and the Landscape Oil Sketch, a free exhibition in Room 1 devoted to Frederic Edwin Church's landscape oil sketches. The National Gallery page records the exact run, 6 February to 28 April 2013, and describes Church as a leading Hudson River School painter who used oil sketches at home and during travels to Niagara Falls, Labrador, Jamaica, Mexico, and the Middle East. The show mattered because it foregrounded a working format often treated as preparatory: the oil sketch. By presenting Church's sketches as fresh, original works worthy of study, the exhibition connected nineteenth-century American landscape practice with broader museum interest in process, travel, and the status of studies as artworks.
The exhibition strengthened public attention to Church's oil sketches as independent objects of aesthetic and scholarly value.
