The 16 square puzzle presenting the "Niagara Falls" painting by American artist Frederic Edwin Church. When the puzzle is complete, you will jump to a 25 square puzzle with the same image. You can go there directly by clicking the red square.

The 25 square puzzle presenting the "Niagara Falls" painting by American artist Frederic Edwin Church. When the puzzle is complete, you will jump to a 36 square puzzle with the same image. You can go there directly by clicking the red square.

The 36 square puzzle presenting the "Niagara Falls" painting by American artist Frederic Edwin Church. When the puzzle is complete, you will jump to a 49 square puzzle with the same image. You can go there directly by clicking the red square.

The 49 square puzzle presenting the "Niagara Falls" painting by American artist Frederic Edwin Church. This puzzle is VERY hard. Congratulations if you succeed. The applet permits up to a ten square puzzle. If there is any interest in my listing a puzzle of greater difficulty, drop me a line and I'll add it in. You can read about the artist below.

Frederic Edwin Church was born into a wealthy family in Hartford, Connecticut on May 4, 1826. At the age of 16, he was already studying art, and in 1844 commenced a two year period of study under Thomas Cole, an established and prominent artist of the Hudson River School. With his gifts as both draftsman and colorist, he had early success, and in 1848 opened a studio in New York City. Winters were spent in New York City but during the rest of the year he travelled, hiked and sketched throughout the U.S. northeast, particularly in the Catskills, the mountains of Vermont and the Hudson Valley. In 1853, he travelled to Columbia and Ecuador, and his resulting South American landscapes, brilliant paintings of power and beauty, of tropical vegetation, fog covered mountains and volcanoes, were shown to great acclaim and commercial success. He continued to travel, to Ecuador again, to Newfoundland and Labrador and, of course, in the United States. Two paintings in particular established him as an artist of stature and perhaps America's greatest painter ~ the painting of Niagara Falls which graces this page and "Heart of the Andes" painted in 1859. During an exhibition of the latter he met Isabel Carnes, (1836-1899), his future wife. They married in June 1860, and had six children, the first two of whom, Herbert and Emma, died young from the ravages of diphtheria. For eighteen months they travelled extensively ~ to Europe, North Africa, the Near East, and to Greece. Soon however, a fine 126 acre site on the Hudson River was selected for a home and in 1872 they moved into what would later be named "Olana", a splendid Persian villa on a hilltop with a view of his beloved Catskills. "Olana", I learn, is derived from an Arabic word meaning "our place on high". Sadly, from the 1870s Church was afflicted with crippling and painful rheumatism of the right arm and hands. While he still managed to paint, he increasingly became a gentleman farmer and devoted much of his time and energy to the redesigning and managing of "Olana" where he died on April 7, 1900. For more biographical data and some fine images of other Church works, you might enjoy a visit here.

Church travelled a number of times to Niagara Falls and saw it throughout the various seasons. "Niagara Falls" was exhibited widely and won a medal at the Paris International Exposition of 1867. In December 1876, it was bought at auction for U.S. $12,500 (a record price for an American artwork at the time) by William Wilson Corcoran, the founder of the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. I learn that the record price for a Church painting at auction is U.S. $8,250,012 ~ on May 24, 1999 for "Home by the Lake". I would like to be able to see (and let you see also) an image of that painting, but so far I have not been able to find one on the WWW. "Icebergs", another masterpiece painted in 1861, was "rediscovered" in England in 1979. I wonder where it was all that time! How we forget how life used to be! "Heart of the Andes" was a sensation in 1859 when it was unveiled in New York City. It was shown in a darkened room lit by gas jets concealed behind silver reflectors! Twelve to thirteen thousand people paid twenty-five cents apiece to file by it each month. Take another look at the painting with that thought in your mind.

Visitors might be interested to see the artist's image and images of his wife and four surviving children on the Olana.org website. Here, however, are images of the artist and his wife with some thumbnails of "Olana" and its splendid views, superimposed upon the major portion of another fine Church painting of the The Parthenon (1871) in Athens, Greece.

Choosing material for these pages is not easy. Each image one adds slows the loading of the page. If that has happened to you, I am sorry. But I thought you would wish to see a black and white engraving dating from the 1880s which is clearly of the above work. I hope that you like it. The colour puzzle image, as I have used it can be seen here.

Have you visited the Parthenon in Athens? I did, some years ago, and as with most ancient buildings or monuments, had difficulty in envisioning what the interior may have looked like when the temple was first constructed. While the addition of the following image may again slow the loading of the page, here is a print dating from the late 1800s (artist unknown) ~ one artist's impression of the Parthenon with its giant statue of the goddess "Athena". It gives a good idea of what very well may once have been.