About Frederic Edwin Church: The American Artist, Frederic Edwin Church was a landscape painter born in Hartford, Connecticut.The wealth of Church's father allowed him to pursue his interest in art from a very early age. At eighteen years of age, Frederic Edwin Church became the pupil of Thomas Cole in Catskill, New York after Daniel Wadsworth, a family neighbor and founder of the Wadsworth Atheneum, intoduced the two.