Frederic Edwin Church

Leader of the NUMA Special Assignments team, Kurt Austin must work with a former KGB spy to save the United States from a lunatic with a generations-spanning grudge in this novel in the #1 New York Times-bestselling series. Kurt Austin is preparing for an interview while aboard a research vessel in the Black Sea. But his television spot suddenly becomes a rescue mission when the waiting film crew is attacked on a nearby island. With little information on the attackers, and no clue to their true agenda, Austin is forced to turn to an unlikely source: his old KGB Cold War adversary Vladimir Petrov. According to Petrov, the island is actually an old submarine base that’s been commandeered by clever mobster-turned-billionaire-businessman Mikhail Razov. Razov is certain he descends from the great Romanov family and he’s out to reclaim his rightful position as czar of Russia. With a powerful resource called “fire ice”, discovered by his mining company, Razov may just have the ammunition he needs to take over the modern world. To stop him, Austin will have to work with Petrov. And he’ll have to find out fast how much trust he can offer an old nemesis in this thrilling adventure that “goes down like a chilled Stolichnaya martini.”

Frederic E. Church is increasingly recognized today as the leading painter of the Hudson River School -- the group of optimistic, realistic landscape painters who flourished during the mid-nineteenth century (1840-1875). He is a pivotal figure, and one who influenced his contemporaries greatly. Yet even Church is known almost solely from his finished oil paintings, which are large, detailed, and panoramic, with no hint of the artist's hand visible. This book brings, for the first time, scholarly attention and the eye of the connoisseur to Church's best oil sketches (112 are discussed and illustrated). In these works, the artist is seen working directly from nature, en plein air, with great speed and emotion. The sketches are astonishingly detailed, yet fresh and sensuous in execution. The book analyzes Church's stylistic progression, his use of sketches in the creation of finished studio paintings, and the formation and decline of his own vision (and that of the Hudson River School itself) as reflected in the changing style and use of the oil sketch. The book is divided into sections according to Church's major travels and subjects: the trips to South America, 1853 and 1857; Niagara; the voyage to the north to see icebergs; the trip to Jamaica, 1865; and his year-and-a-half-long journey to Europe and the Near East, starting in the autumn of 1867. The last years of his life Church spent the winters in Mexico and the summers at "Olana" -- center of the earth -- the house he designed and built in the fotthills of the Catskills. - Jacket flap.