Perhaps the most famous and well-traveled painting in the museum’s collection, The Natural Bridge by Frederic Edwin Church, is for any Virginian an immediately recognizable scene. Church painted this picture in 1852 based on sketches he made on a trip to Natural Bridge the previous summer with friends Cyrus and Mary Field. Church took precise notes on his sketches of the geological formations as well as the surrounding flora and there is an oft repeated anecdote that Cyrus Field kept a rock fragment from the trip and compared it to the painting for accuracy.
Frederic Edwin Church
American, 1826-1900
The Natural Bridge, 1852
Oil on canvas
38 x 33 in
Gift of Thomas Fortune Ryan, 1912.1
