How does this artwork elucidate its Reception and legacy?
The painting was widely acclaimed. Poetry was written in its honor, and a composer, George William Warren, dedicated a piece to it in 1863. Mark Twain described the painting to his brother Orion Clemens in a letter of 1860:
I have just returned from a visit to the most wonderfully beautiful painting which this city has ever seen—Church's 'Heart of the Andes' ... I have seen it several times, but it is always a new picture—totally new—you seem to see nothing the second time which you saw the first. We took the opera glass, and examined its beauties minutely, for the naked eye cannot discern the little wayside flowers, and soft shadows and patches of sunshine, and half-hidden bunches of grass and jets of water which form some of its most enchanting features. There is no slurring of perspective effect about it—the most distant—the minutest object in it has a marked and distinct personality—so that you may count the very leaves on the trees. When  you first see the tame, ordinary-looking picture, your first impulse is to turn your back upon it, and say "Humbug"—but your third visit will find your brain gasping and straining with futile efforts to take all the wonder in—and appreciate it in its fulness and understand how such a miracle could have been conceived and executed by human brain and human hands. You will never get tired of looking at the picture, but your reflections—your efforts to grasp an intelligible Something—you hardly know what—will grow so painful that you will have to go away from the thing, in order to obtain relief. You may find relief, but you cannot banish the picture—it remains with you still. It is in my mind now—and the smallest feature could not be removed without my detecting it.
The New York Times described the painting's "harmony of design" and "chaos of chords or colors gradually rises upon the enchanted mind a rich and orderly creation, full of familiar objects, yet wholly new in its combinations and its significance."Church eventually sold the work to William Tilden Blodgett for $10,000—at that time the highest price paid for a work by a living American artist. Moreover, Church reserved the right to re-sell the painting should he receive an offer of at least $20,000. (American landscapist Albert Bierstadt surpassed both prices when he sold The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak for $25,000 in 1865.) Blodgett held the painting until his death in 1875. It was acquired by Margaret Worcester Dows, widow of grain merchant David Dows, and bequeathed to the Metropolitan Museum of Art upon her death in February 1909. In 1993, the museum held an exhibition that attempted to reproduce the conditions of the 1859 exhibit.
Recent descriptions place it within modern thematic discourse, including the tension between art and science, and American territorial expansion. The split between the humanities and the scientific worldview was nascent in 1859: Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species was published later in the same year as Church's painting.
On the Origin of Species Mark Twain William Tilden Blodgett American territorial expansion grain merchant New York Charles Darwin Orion Clemens The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak Albert Bierstadt Andes Metropolitan Museum of Art