Cotopaxi (painting)

Cotopaxi is an 1862 oil painting by American artist Frederic Edwin Church, a member of the Hudson River School. The painting depicts Cotopaxi, an active volcano that is also the second highest peak in modern-day Ecuador, spewing smoke and ash across a colorful sunrise. The work was commissioned by well-known philanthropist and collector James Lenox and was first exhibited in New York City in 1863. Cotopaxi was met with great acclaim, seen by some as a "parable" of the Civil War, then raging in the American South, with its casting of light against darkness in a vast tropical landscape. Church first depicted Cotopaxi beginning in 1853 during his first of several travels to South America, forming a series of at least 10 paintings on the subject during his lifetime. Cotopaxi has been called by some art historians the "apex" of the Cotopaxi series or Church's "ultimate interpretation" of the eponymous volcano.

Cotopaxi is currently exhibited by the Detroit Institute of Arts, while other members of the series are housed in various museums and private collections, including the New Britain Museum of American Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Art Institute of Chicago, and Yale University Art Gallery.