As a boy, Frederick S. Church was kept from school because of illness, and in his free time, he learned to draw animals and birds, subjects that occupied the artist for the rest of his life. By delivering newspapers, he was able to afford lessons from a local Dutch landscape painter, Marius Hartung. In 1855 he moved to Chicago to work as a delivery clerk for the American Express Company. During the Civil War Church served in the Chicago Light Artillery; he returned to that city and continued in his post with American Express until about 1868.
Church was able to change his work time to the night shift in order to take classes with Walter Shirlaw at the Chicago Academy of Design. His classmate J. Carroll Beckwith later recalled that Church's drawings were frequently done in blue American Express packaging pencil instead of the usual charcoal. After quitting American Express, he spent about another year and a half in Chicago working in the engraving field. In 1870 he moved to New York to find work as an illustrator. He also entered the National Academy school, studying in the antique class from 1870 to 1875 and in the life class from 1871 to 1875. In the latter year he helped found the Art Students League and became a close friend of one of its first teachers, William Merritt Chase.
Soon after arriving in New York, Church obtained illustration work at Harper's and St. Nicholas magazines, among others. He continued producing quick, humorous line drawings for the rest of his life. (They usually embellish his correspondence and published short stories. The Academy possesses a small group of Church letters, most filled with humorous drawings and marginalia.) However, he also began to paint, specializing in fantastic scenes of birds and animals, usually combined with allegorical female figures. He found his models in the Bronx and Central Park zoos, which he visited frequently. Although often termed amateurish and technically uneven (Isham, 471), Church's early work can be seen as a precocious precursor of international Symbolist tendencies.
Church was active in Academy affairs, serving on the Council from 1887 to 1890 and again from 1896 to 1899; as a member of the Council's school committee, he was particularly attentive to the management of the school. His contributions to Academy exhibitions began in 1874 and continued almost uninterruptedly until his death.
Following the turn of the century, his work became quite popular. He had a comfortable country studio on the estate of a friend in Far Hills, New Jersey, and a New York workplace at the top of the Carnegie Hall tower. He received a great deal of press attention in 1906 after his first trip to Europe because of his publicly expressed disdain for European art, old and new. A self-styled Yankee, Church reveled in his "Americanness," even though his work, particularly his etchings, received surprising appreciation in Europe. Church began to suffer impaired vision several years before his death.
