The Monastery of San Pedro (Our Lady of the Snows)
Frederic Edwin Church (American, 1826–1900)
1879
- Medium
- oil on canvas
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- Unframed: 118.8 x 183.2 cm (46 3/4 x 72 1/8 in.)
- Culture
- America
- Museum
- Cleveland Museum of Art, American Painting and Sculpture
- Credit line
- Hinman B. Hurlbut Collection
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Tweens profiles and older: its subjects are known and suit older children. How works are placed
View at the Cleveland Museum of Art
About this work
Although the location that inspired the painting has been subject to scholarly debate, many believe it derives from Church’s travels through the Ecuadorean Andes nearly a quarter century earlier. The composition reads as an allegory of spiritual salvation: perched atop a dramatic cliff, a brilliantly backlit monastery overlooks a shadowed foreground where a solitary figure navigates a rugged path.
