In the spring of 1859, as On the Origin of Species was going to press, New Yorkers flooded the first studio building for artists to see The Heart of the Andes — a single painting exhibited by itself in an unknown young artist’s studio.

Alexander von Humboldt’s account of his time Latin America, which had sent Darwin on his epochal voyage, had sent Frederic Edwin Church (May 4, 1826–April 7, 1900) in Humboldt’s footsteps and returned him enraptured, transformed, restless to render the experience palpable, to transport others who would never have a chance to contact such ravishing wildness — a place of “perpetual spring,” as Humboldt had written in Cosmos, where “the depths of the earth and the vaults of heaven display all the richness of their forms and the variety of their phenomena,” where the laws of nature “stand indelibly described on the rocky walls and abrupt declivities of the Cordilleras.”

Quiet and introverted, prone to melancholy, Church had always been drawn to the wild wonders of nature, saved and set free by them. An earlier painting of Niagara Falls had prompted a London paper to declare that “art wasn’t limited to Europe” and that “it was not necessary for genius to study in any school but that of nature.” His cloudscapes surpassed even those of his Norwegian contemporary Knud Baade.

But The Heart of the Andes was something else entirely.

On the immense canvas, occupying nearly the entire wall of his studio, the thirty-two-year-old artist had painted not what he had seen in the Andes but what he had felt — the “unparalleled magnificence” of this lush land, he gasped in his diary, proclaiming it “one of the great wonders of Nature.” The setting was a real place just outside Quito, but Church had infused it with elements of other Andean landscapes that had impressed themselves upon his soul during two separate trips four years apart — a composite of the enchanted imagination he spent more than a year composing.

Peak by peak the mountain cascades toward the clouds until it merges with the sky as its foot melts into a waterfall. Details of exquisite aliveness punctuate the vista — a blue-blooming shrub, a pendulous bird’s nest, a resplendent quetzal perched on a branch, lichen on the bark of a broken tree, two people kneeling before a white wooden cross — all of it awash in light that only consciousness can see, impossible for a camera lens to capture.

Rebelling against the stale convention of gilded frames, Church had invented a new kind of frame made of walnut wood, onto which he draped curtains to give the illusion of a window opening when the painting was being revealed. Silver reflectors focused gas lights onto the canvas to emulate the sunlit atmosphere of the landscape itself. The effect, The New York Times wrote, was “simply magical” — “a new sensation in art, giving a reality of atmospheric space to the picture, and a delicacy to the tones of the coloring, which must be seen to be at all appreciated or understood.” Before the days of easy travel, before color photography, most of the visitors had never seen and would never see with their own eyes nature so wild, mountains so majestic. Here was virtual reality — an immersion in light, color, and feeling that speaks not just to the eye but to the entire system of being we call soul.

For three weeks, people packed into Church’s studio, sometimes more than two thousand per day, gasping each time the curtain was drawn open, shuddering with the vertigo of the sublime. On the closing day, the line for admission curled around the block, around the clock. An influential art collector who would help found the Metropolitan Museum of Art a decade later ended up purchasing the painting for $10,000 — more than anyone had ever paid for a work by an American artist.

The Heart of the Andes was also an emblem of the cruelties of chance and the mercies of chance. Just after the exhibition opened, Church received devastating news of his hero — 89 and weakened by a stroke, Alexander von Humboldt had greeted death the way he had lived life: “How glorious these sunbeams are!” were his last words, “They seem to call Earth to the Heavens!”

He could have been describing Church’s painting; he could have been describing that incandescent cosmos of connection two people enter when they fall in love — the cosmos Church what thrust into without warning when he encountered among the thousands of spectators the woman who would become the love of his life. Within a year, he had married Isabel at the picturesque Hudson Valley mansion he bought with his earnings from The Heart of the Andes.

At forty-four, on the insistence of Central Park creator Frederick Law Olmsted, Church became Park Commissioner of New York — the closest thing to a guardian angel of the urban wilderness. He would devote the rest of his life capturing nature’s wildness and wonder in transportive paintings of rainbows and volcanos, waterfalls and icebergs, numberless cloud studies and sunsets, moonrise and the aurora borealis, all of them rendered with that rare combination of passion and precision that makes anything — a painting, a poem, a person — great.

And much of it he shared with Isabel, who sat with him sunset after sunset over the Hudson Valley, pressed ferns into an herbarium alongside him while he painted in Jamaica — a living reminder that there is no greater form of love than looking together in the direction of wonder.