REVIEWS OF GLORIOUS COUNTRY
“Splendid…Johnson has written the ideal biography of an artist, informed by his own writings and enthralling in its exploration of a life well lived.” —Air Mail
“Superb.…Frederic Church is today half-forgotten. Has Ms. Johnson retrieved him for us as a man worthy of interest? It can surely be argued that she has. A lively, fluent writer, she has given us not a piece of art history or criticism but rather the biography of an enormously gifted man, whose enthusiasms and acquaintances intersected with those of many other fascinating people in New York City and beyond….Glorious Country is an absorbing contribution to the life story of a metropolis.” —The Wall Street Journal
“Pulitzer Prize nominee Victoria Johnson brings such scenes vividly to life in her study of Church, Glorious Country….Church was a man of action…and Johnson matches him for gusto. Not for her the longueurs of the artist’s childhood and education. Her brightly told biography begins in medias res, with Church as the toast of Manhattan.” —Financial Times
“The two-hundredth anniversary of Church’s birth is being marked this year by a range of publications and exhibitions...Perhaps even more apt, however, is the title of a lively new biography of the artist by Victoria Johnson, Glorious Country: How the Artist Frederic Church Brought the World to America and America to the World (Scribner), the 'glorious country' in question being America…Johnson’s descriptions of his journeys are among the most exciting parts of her biography.” —Sebastian Smee, “The Artist Who Made America Look Like a Promised Land,” The New Yorker, May 4, 2026
“Victoria Johnson has done full justice to this extraordinarily talented man who was both blessed and cursed by fate...In vivid prose, she draws Church’s character into focus..... The artist, ever reticent about his inner life, would surely have preferred that we keep our attention focused on his paintings. Fortunately for us, Victoria Johnson, in drawing his portrait in such vibrant detail, has given us a biography as richly rewarding and absorbing as his art.” —The American Scholar
“Astute...bravura...Church once wrote to a fellow artist, ‘See for yourself this glorious country, where we reside. I cannot do it justice either with pen or pencil.’ Victoria Johnson’s sharp-eyed biography proves he was wrong on that score.” —Washington Independent Review of Books
“Johnson draws on a trove of archival sources and images to create an engrossing, empathetic, and comprehensive life of painter Frederic Edwin Church...vibrant...An impressive, beautifully written work of scholarship.” —Kirkus Reviews, STARRED review
“A superb biography of pioneering 19th-century landscape painter Frederic Church...Throughout, Johnson astutely analyzes how Church used nature to imagine and critique the nascent nation’s identity...a vivid, transformational portrait of an artist who chronicled a nation in flux.” —Publishers Weekly, STARRED review
“Just in time for Church’s bicentennial…this biography is also perfectly timed with the nation’s semiquincentennial….Johnson, whose American Eden was a Pulitzer finalist, depicts Church as a sort of Indiana Jones with a painting kit, and she recreates his terrifying treks on high mountain trails in captivating detail.” —BookPage, STARRED review