Rainy Season in the Tropics

A landscape held beneath two arcs

The rainbow provides the clearest connection across an otherwise divided scene. Its broad inner arc rises from the left-hand rocks, passes over the central opening and descends toward the palms on the right. A second, paler arc follows outside it. Their curves give continuity to the sky above irregular cliffs and uneven stretches of vegetation.

Below them, Church offers several ways of judging distance. Large leaves, tangled growth and the trunks of palms occupy the near right edge. Across the gap, steep rock faces have a substantial presence, although rain softens parts of their outlines. Much farther away, pale mountains rise behind a succession of hazier forms.

The eye can therefore move upward with the bows or deeper into the landscape beneath them. Neither movement excludes the other. The rainbow makes the whole arrangement graspable at once, while the changing visibility of individual features encourages slower examination of the space it spans.

How a double rainbow forms

A double rainbow has a physical explanation. Sunlight entering raindrops is refracted, separated into colours and reflected internally before returning toward the observer. The National Weather Service explains that the primary bow involves one internal reflection, while the secondary involves two. The second appears outside the first and reverses its colour sequence.^[2]

In Church’s painting, the stronger inner bow has its warm red edge toward the outside of its curve. The less conspicuous outer bow reverses that arrangement. This distinction is easily missed when the painting is viewed at a small size, but it makes the paired arcs more than a repeated decorative outline.

The effect also places the implied observer in relation to the weather: sunlight must come from behind the observer toward rain ahead. Church does not need to paint the sun itself to establish that relationship. Illuminated foliage and rain-filled distance make contrasting light conditions visible across the scene.

Comparing the painting with a photograph

Stefan Fussan’s photograph of a double rainbow over the Klias Wetlands in Borneo, taken on 21 January 2009, offers a useful comparison.^[3] It shows a bright primary bow above sunlit trees and a much fainter secondary arc farther out in the grey sky. Dark water occupies the foreground.

The photograph helps explain why the outer bow can be hard to notice. Its colours are weaker, and parts of its curve merge with the background. In the painting, Church similarly gives the second arc less prominence, although both curves remain important to the overall design.

The two images also differ in their treatment of space. The photograph concentrates attention on sky, treetops and water from one modern viewpoint. Church adds a much deeper sequence of cliffs, valleys and mountains, spreading the weather effect across an extensive panorama. The photograph was taken in another tropical location more than a century later; it illustrates the phenomenon rather than documenting the landscape he painted.

A painting developed over several years

The chronology matters when connecting the canvas with Church’s personal history. Franklin Kelly’s National Gallery of Art essay places its beginning in 1864 and its completion in the middle of 1866.^[4] The initial conception therefore preceded Church’s visit to Jamaica and the bereavement that prompted that journey.

Olana curator Evelyn D. Trebilcock describes the unfinished painting as already present in Church’s Tenth Street studio when he travelled to Jamaica in 1865. She relates its earlier material to his South American experience, while explaining how Jamaican observations supplied fresh botanical and atmospheric detail.^[5]

These stages distinguish an evolving composition from a scene painted directly outdoors. A large canvas could draw upon observations made at different times, with new studies affecting a design already under way. Its title describes a broad climatic subject, and the combination of palms, precipitous rocks and distant snowy heights should not be treated as the record of one Jamaican lookout.

The preparatory drawing

Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum holds Church’s Study for Rainy Season in the Tropics, dated 1865–1866. The institutional open-access record identifies graphite on white notepad paper ruled in blue ink, measuring 13.4 × 20.6 cm. It was given by Louis P. Church and bears accession 1917-4-771.^[6]

The drawing already places the double bow over a central opening, with prominent rocks to the left and palms to the right. The lightly ruled sheet lets the broad organisation stand out without the finished canvas’s rich colour. Graphite shading establishes the nearest slopes and the drop between them, while faint lines carry the view toward distant peaks.

The right-hand palm group appears more upright and exposed against the sky than the densely layered vegetation of the painting. On the left, a substantial building occupies a cliff edge beneath the descending bow. That conspicuous architectural feature does not appear in the same form in the finished canvas.

The comparison shows Church revising the balance of natural and built forms while retaining the overarching curves. It also makes the amount of invention visible. A drawing can establish relationships that remain useful through later changes, rather than simply providing an outline to be transferred unchanged onto a larger surface.

Studying weather and vegetation in Jamaica

Church and his wife Isabel spent several months in Jamaica in 1865. Trebilcock describes sustained sketching, with Church recording vegetation and changes in weather. Among the works she discusses is Storm in the Blue Mountains, Jamaica, painted in August, which contributed to his developing tropical subject.^[5]

Her account also draws on Horace Robbins’s letters describing Church’s speed and concentration when making studies. Those observations help explain how numerous smaller records could supply a large studio picture. A study might preserve the shape of a plant, the meeting of rain and sunlight, or the appearance of distant slopes without recording every element of the eventual panorama.

The relationship can be examined in the finished painting’s right foreground. Broad leaves overlap narrow fronds, and stems cross areas of deeper shade. Some surfaces catch small touches of light while others disappear into the surrounding growth. That variety gives the vegetation substance beyond a general patch of green.

Looking into the right foreground

The nearest plants form a complicated edge to the view. Their shapes differ markedly from the smooth rainbow above: spreading leaves, hanging growth and irregular branches interrupt the ground and the lower sky. The upper palm crowns remain recognisable against lighter areas, while smaller plants accumulate around their bases.

A narrow path threads through this growth. Small travellers and animals occupy it, including a red-clad figure near the lower right. They are easy to overlook because the surrounding leaves and trunks command so much more space. Once noticed, they provide a scale for the vegetation and a possible route into the landscape.

The ground along the route catches light in patches. Its broken surface contrasts with the distant water, which appears calmer and more continuous. Church thus makes the near area available for close inspection while keeping the farther scene less definite. The foreground offers a place to imagine standing, even as the panorama carries the eye beyond the travellers’ immediate surroundings.

Rain, falling water and distant mountains

Water appears in several different forms. A slender fall descends among the left-hand rocks, while a more diffuse veil of rain or mist crosses the central distance. Farther back, a stretch of pale water provides a quieter interval between successive landforms.

These passages differ in their edges. Falling water is described as a narrow pale movement against darker terrain. Mist spreads more broadly and partly hides the forms behind it. The distant water is flatter, its appearance shaped by the surrounding haze rather than by conspicuous turbulence.

High on the right, a pale snowy peak remains visible beyond the warmer, greener foreground. Its remoteness depends on both scale and contrast: it is smaller and less sharply defined than the nearer rocks, yet its light surface separates it from the sky. The painting moves between climates and elevations within one continuous prospect, without identifying every feature as an exact geographical landmark.

Bereavement and interpretations of hope

Herbert Edwin and Emma Frances, Church and Isabel’s two young children, died in March 1865. James Anthony Ryan’s account places the Jamaica journey after that loss and reads Rainy Season in relation to grief and the possibility of renewal.^[4] The museum’s interpretation also associates the double rainbow with renewed optimism after bereavement.^[1]

The painting’s changing conditions support such a reading: heavy weather and broken ground coexist with light and vigorous growth. Nevertheless, the documented family history does not establish a separate meaning for every rock, plant or valley. The picture had already begun before the deaths, and its visible forms continued to develop through subsequent study.

Kelly offers a related national interpretation, connecting the rainbow with the biblical covenant and hopes for peace after the American Civil War.^[4] Personal and national readings can overlap without exhausting the painting’s subject. Its weather remains convincing as weather, and its plants retain their particular forms even when considered within a larger account of recovery.

Jamaica’s historical setting

Olana’s institutional exhibition account places Church’s Jamaican visit within an island under British colonial rule. It also notes the Morant Bay rebellion and its violent suppression later in 1865, after the Churches had departed.^[7]

That context qualifies an encounter with the tropics organised around scenery and botanical observation. The island was an inhabited society with political conflicts and the continuing consequences of slavery. Church’s broad landscape selects weather, terrain and small figures from the possibilities available to a painter; it does not provide a complete account of contemporary Jamaican life.

Olana connects some of this history specifically with Church’s later Vale of St Thomas. Those arguments should be considered with that painting rather than assigned automatically to the foreground of Rainy Season. Here, the historical setting helps situate the studies without identifying the invented panorama as the location of the rebellion.

Scale and the museum collection

The 1989 National Gallery catalogue publishes dimensions of 142.9 × 213.8 cm for the canvas.^[4] At more than two metres wide, the painting allows both the broad weather effect and very small foreground incidents to matter. A reduced reproduction makes the curves immediately apparent, while the plants, path and falling water reward a closer view.

The owning museum credits its acquisition as a museum purchase through the Mildred Anna Williams Collection.^[1] The combination of spectacle and close description also links it with The Heart of the Andes. In both pictures, Church brings detailed observations into an extensive composed landscape, allowing the eye to travel between near particulars and distant mountains.