Inspired by the writings of the German naturalist, Alexander von Humboldt, Church traveled with Cyrus Field to South America in 1853 and again four years later with the artist Lois Rémy Mignot. While Tropical Landscape is undated, according to Church scholar, Gerald Carr, it likely comes out of his first trip to South America and most closely resembles his View on the Magdalena River (1857, The Manoogian Collection), painted shortly before Church’s second trip.

Church’s journey to Colombia was not without fatigue and hardship as he ascended the Rio Magdalena by canoe and travelled over land by mule, but as the 19th-century critic Henry T. Tuckerman relates, these “trials were soon forgotten, when the splendors of an exuberant and radiant vegetation burst upon his sight, and he was enabled at leisure to explore scenes of alternate wildness and luxury, full of novel effects and suggestive traits for the pencil.” Writing in his journal in Spanish, a language he was newly acquiring, Church expressed his delight in the “vegetacion exúberante y verde” ( he discovered along the Rio Magdalena, noting at one time: “Hoy el exuberancia del vegetacion ha deleytandome mas que en qualquier tiempo antes. ” Paintings from his first expedition to the Southern “terrestrial paradise” were warmly received by New York critics when exhibited at the National Academy in 1855. La Magdalena ( Scene of the Magdalene, 1854, National Academy of Design) was considered by one reviewer to be a “most elaborate and apparently most truthful portraiture of that marvellous tropical vegetation, which bedecks the river-banks.”