He did his research at the zoo

Frederick Stuart Church (1842–1924) did his research in unusual places. Sketchbook in hand, he was a fixture at the Central Park Zoo and at Barnum & Bailey’s headquarters, studying how animals move, rest and react.

Stories of his methods have him tossing a ball with an elephant and losing whole afternoons in front of a seahorse tank. The payoff was some of the most beloved art of America’s Gilded Age: animals with accurate anatomy and real personalities, drawn by a man who plainly adored them.

The two were contemporaries with nearly identical names, but their work could hardly be more different. Where Frederic Edwin painted mountains and volcanoes, Frederick Stuart painted polar bears on ice skates.

From American Express clerk to artist

Church was born on December 1, 1842, in Grand Rapids, Michigan. His father was a prominent lawyer and political figure, and his parents expected him to go into business. Illness kept him out of school for long stretches as a boy. He filled the time drawing animals and birds, the subjects that would define his career.

1. Boyhood, Grand RapidsPays for lessons from Dutch landscape painter Marius Hartung with newspaper-route money.
2. Age 13, ChicagoTakes a job as a clerk with the newly founded American Express Company.
3. The Civil WarEnlists in the Union Army and serves three years in the artillery. He comes home resolved to be an artist.
4. ChicagoStudies drawing under Walter Shirlaw at the Chicago Academy of Design.
5. 1870, New York CityTrains at the National Academy of Design under Lemuel Wilmarth and joins the Art Students League. New York stays his home for life.

An American artist who didn’t need Europe

In Church’s day, ambitious American painters went to Paris, Munich or Rome to finish their training. Church never did. He believed firmly in academic training, but he saw no reason to get it abroad, and he only crossed the Atlantic late in life.

He was openly proud of American art and liked to say that foreign art had little to teach Americans. Around 1920, in a letter to a cousin, he grumbled about a room of modern French art at the Metropolitan Museum, joking that most of it would scare a dog away for good.

Polar bears on ice skates

By the mid-1870s, Church was one of the most sought-after illustrators in New York. His work ran in Harper’s Weekly, Harper’s Bazaar, Harper’s Young People, Frank Leslie’s Weekly, Century Magazine and the Ladies’ Home Journal. He was elected an Associate of the National Academy of Design in 1883 and a full Academician in 1885, and was also a member of the American Watercolor Society, the New York Etching Club and the Society of Illustrators.

His holiday illustrations are pure delight. A few favorites:

Harper’s Young People · 1888

Christmas Morning: One Hundred Fathoms Deep

Little mermaids opening presents on the sea floor.

From the Koehler collection

Bear and Cherub

A cherub in a pink holiday cap steers a garlanded polar bear through a snowy wood. Watercolor and gouache, signed in red.

1. Harper’s Weekly · Dec 1875

   Opening of the Season at the North Pole

   Polar bears out on ice skates.

2. Harper’s Weekly · Dec 1892

   Flapjacks

   A small bear holds the griddle while a young woman cooks breakfast for a crowd of hungry bears.

3. Harper’s Bazaar · Dec 1898

   Santa’s Cake Walk

   Santa conducts a polar bear band from his sleigh while dozens of bears dance in top hats.

Church also took commercial work. He illustrated the Elgin National Watch Company’s almanac and designed an 1881 Christmas card for Louis Prang & Company, the firm that popularized Christmas cards in America. His illustrated edition of Aesop’s Fables, with a picture for every fable and an elaborate cover, is often called his finest book work.

He was a gifted etcher too. In 1884 he contributed four etchings to The Hawthorne Portfolio, and his etching The Mermaid appeared in The American Art Review.

Women and wild beasts

Church’s paintings return again and again to one dreamlike idea: a serene young woman at perfect ease with a wild animal.

Tigers lie at her feet. Bears help her with chores. Flamingos and swans gather around her like attendants. Nothing is ever threatening. The beasts are gentle, sometimes a little comic, and always on her side. Those years of sketching show here. Because he knew how each creature moved and what its expressions meant, he could give his animals moods and personalities without losing their anatomy.

The Smithsonian American Art Museum holds several of these paintings:

• The Viking’s Daughter 1887
• Supremacy 1887
• Girl with Rabbits 1886
• Circe 1910

Later in his career he painted a run of flamingo pictures, such as Maiden with Flamingos (1916). Scholars have noted that his decorative style of the 1880s anticipated the Art Nouveau movement of the following decade.

Letters full of bears

Church couldn’t write a note without drawing in it. His letters to friends, patrons and fellow artists are full of sketches: a bear strumming a guitar, a flamingo, little cartoons in the margins. Today they’re collected in their own right. The National Academy of Design, the Morgan Library, the New-York Historical Society and the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art all hold examples.

Some of the warmest went to Mary Leland Bloomer, known as Mollie, who modeled for him regularly. The two shared a running joke about “buckwheat pancake eaters,” and Church sometimes signed his letters to her “Buckwheat Pancake Church.”

The collectors who kept him alive

Church’s career, and his reputation today, owe a great deal to a small circle of devoted collectors.

These collectors did more than buy pictures. They cared for them, lived with them, and eventually passed them on. That is how a painter of whimsical bears ended up in a national museum.