A Country Home was unveiled to the public in April 1854, at the popular annual exhibition of New York's National Academy of Design, the most important showcase for contemporary artists at that time. The National Academy of Design, founded in 1826, was the first institution in the United States established and managed by professional artists. It was an art school and an exhibition space: "There shall be an annual exhibition of works of living artists," the academy's by-laws stated. The academy further stipulated that an artist's submission for exhibition could not be a work of art that had been exhibited at any other academy annual. Each yearly show was guaranteed to consist of new works by a wide range of artists. The academy shows were much anticipated, and an eager audience turned out in great numbers to see each exhibition's new offerings. Critics lavished attention on the annual exhibitions. Their voluminous descriptions, written in an age before photography enabled newspapers and magazines to illustrate works of art for readers, are important sources of information about individual works of art and the appreciation of these paintings in their time.

General Joseph Gardner Swift was the first owner of A Country Home. He probably bought the painting after admiring it in the 1854 exhibition of the National Academy of Design. Swift's estate records show that he was not exactly an art collector—he possessed only a very few family portraits in addition to the Church canvas. We can only speculate about the appeal that this particular picture had for him.

In 1854, Swift was living as a country gentleman in upstate New York, in the rural town of Geneva, in a landscape much like the one Church painted. Perhaps the subject of A Country Home represented to Swift something of his own circumstance, living quietly along the shore of Lake Geneva. It is also possible that Swift bought the painting on the advice of his good friend, painter Daniel Huntington, who as president of the National Academy of Design must have recognized Church as a rare and rising young talent.

Thomas Cole's sudden death in February 1848 stunned the art world. The intensity of Church's feeling at the loss of his mentor can be measured in the extraordinary work that occupied him in the weeks immediately following Cole's death. By April 1848, Church had completed a poignant, richly detailed landscape that was a symbolic memorial to Cole.

This work was not to be his only tribute. As Church continued to honor Cole's legacy in his art, all that he had admired in his teacher and friend came forth in his next paintings, each an exquisitely rendered variation on a theme Cole had popularized, especially with his painting The Hunter's Return. In developing a subject that he and others associated closely with Cole, Church paid homage to his mentor while gaining recognition as Cole's most talented and worthy successor.

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The recent discovery of this long-lost canvas from 1849 allows us to see how Church began to develop the "home-in-the-wilderness" theme in the months following the death of his teacher and mentor, Thomas Cole, in February 1848.

The view is composed of vignettes that Church sketched near Pittsford, Vermont, on his summertime rambles in 1848. The scene is not specifically a tribute to country life, however. The setting is almost incidental to the real subject—the magnificent sunset and its glistening effect on the wet landscape. The painting is a sky study. Church even chose to title it Evening After a Storm, disassociating it from any particular place and focusing our attention on the passing clouds. The stunning effect was described in 1849 as that of "a veil lifting to reveal the theatrical display of light and shadow patterns playing before us through the landscape below."

About the time he created Evening After a Storm, Church conceived of the painting now known only by a descriptive title, New England Landscape. This painting is a very different interpretation of the same rural Vermont landscape. It is not a dramatic sunset sky study. It is a highly detailed, idyllic scene of picnickers on a millpond, idling on a late-summer afternoon. The scene is bathed in brilliant light. This painting shows that Church's interest extended to every element of the greatly varied setting.

What was it about rural scenery that Church and his enthusiastic audience found so compelling? The settled landscapes of old New England were the first expressions of a population's pioneer spirit. They offered a congenial view of America as a land of enduring peace and plenty, of self-reliant country folk piously devoted to nature. "The hand of man generally improves a landscape," one observer declared in 1851, writing in the popular magazine The Home Book of the Picturesque. "The earth has been given to him, and his presence in Eden is natural; he gives life and spirit to the garden."

The subject of A Country Home clearly held enduring personal meaning for Church, and this particular painting proved to be critical to his early success. The painting was first exhibited in the same year that Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) published Walden; or, Life in the Woods, the account of his months of seclusion in a cabin on the shore of Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts. The sentiments that Church and Thoreau expressed in their respective celebrations of the solitary life were conveyed as well by other thoughtful artists and writers in this period as they became more aware of the implications of the country's rapid urban and industrial growth.

A Country Home would be the last picture in which Church so lovingly created the calm and perfectly harmonious world of rural New England. Why did Church turn away from a theme that had dominated his painting for some five years—a theme that had established his reputation and that resonated with something fundamental in his character?

Having traveled to South America in the summer of 1853, Church must have begun to recognize the conceptual limitations of New England scenery and was attracted by the lure of new realms. The fact that in 1854, a writer had harshly criticized the repetition that he felt now characterized Church's work could have further motivated the artist to explore fresh subjects. In South America, Church had observed more exotic splendors of nature, and he had studied them with a naturalist's eye. Strangeness in nature was now as appealing to him as the familiar landscape had been.

In 1860, when Church returned again to painting New England scenery, it was not with the same sense of pleasure and optimism that are so obvious in his picturesque views of the country home. Now he seemed to paint with a sense of paradise lost. His subjects are the dark and desolate wilderness. Do these paintings of the 1860s reflect the mood of an artist whose nation was wracked by civil war? Pictures of America as an enduring land of peace and plenty must have seemed out of sync with those turbulent years.