Fine art




The Niagara Falls were such an attraction to landscape artists that, writes John Howat, they were "the most popular, the most often treated, and the tritest single item of subject matter to appear in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European and American landscape painting".

  • A General View of the Falls of Niagara by Alvan Fisher, 1820

  • Distant View of Niagara Falls by Thomas Cole, 1830

  • Niagara Fälle. Les chûtes du Niagara. Niagara Falls by Karl Bodmer, circa 1832

  • Voute sous la Chute du Niagara – Niagara Falls, circa 1841

  • Niagara by Frederic Edwin Church, 1857

  • Underneath Niagara Falls by Ferdinand Richardt, 1862

  • Niagara by Louis Rémy Mignot, circa 1866

  • Falls of Niagara from Below by Albert Bierstadt, 1869

  • Niagara Falls by William Morris Hunt, 1878

  • Niagara Falls, circa 1880

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Over the falls

Image
Jumps, plunges and walks edit In October 1829, Sam Patch, who called himself "the Yankee Leapster", jumped from a high tower into the gorge below the falls and survived; this began a long tradition of daredevils trying to go over the falls. Englishman Captain Matthew Webb, the first man to swim the English Channel, drowned in 1883 trying to swim the rapids downriver from the falls. On October 24, 1901, 63-year-old Michigan school teacher Annie Edson Taylor became the first person to go over the falls in a barrel as a publicity stunt; she survived, bleeding, but otherwise unharmed. Soon after exiting the barrel, she said, "No one ought ever do that again." Before Taylor's attempt, on October 19 her domestic cat named Iagara was sent over the Horseshoe Falls in her barrel to test its strength. Contrary to rumours at the time, the cat survived the plunge unharmed and later posed with Taylor in photographs. Since Taylor's historic ride, over a dozen people have...
Read more

Geology

Image
The features that became Niagara Falls were created by the Wisconsin glaciation about 10,000 years ago. The retreat of the ice sheet left behind a large amount of meltwater (see Lake Algonquin, Lake Chicago, Glacial Lake Iroquois, and Champlain Sea) that filled up the basins that the glaciers had carved, thus creating the Great Lakes as we know them today. Scientists argue there is an old valley, St David's Buried Gorge, buried by glacial drift, at the approximate location of the present Welland Canal. When the ice melted, the upper Great Lakes emptied into the Niagara River, which followed the rearranged topography across the Niagara Escarpment. In time, the river cut a gorge through the north-facing cliff, or cuesta. Because of the interactions of three major rock formations, the rocky bed did not erode evenly. The top rock formation was composed of erosion-resistant limestone and dolomite of the Lockport Formation. That hard layer of stone eroded more slowly than the underlying ...
Read more

Niagara Falls

Image
Niagara Falls / n aɪ ˈ æ ɡ r ə , n aɪ ˈ æ ɡ ə r ə / is a group of three waterfalls at the southern end of Niagara Gorge, spanning the border between the province of Ontario in Canada and the state of New York in the United States. The largest of the three is Horseshoe Falls, also known as Canadian Falls, which straddles the international border of the two countries. The smaller American Falls and Bridal Veil Falls lie within the United States. Bridal Veil Falls are separated from Horseshoe Falls by Goat Island and from American Falls by Luna Island, with both islands situated in New York. Located on the Niagara River, which drains Lake Erie into Lake Ontario, the combined falls have the highest flow rate of any waterfall in North America that has a vertical drop of more than 50 metres (160 ft). During peak daytime tourist hours, more than 168,000 m3 (six million cubic feet) of water goes over the crest of the falls every minute. Horseshoe Falls is the most powerful waterfall in No...
Read more