In the century since the death of painter Frederic Edwin Church of the Hudson River School of landscape artists, only a handful of exhibitions have focused on his works.Sometimes the stars align just right, and that’s what happened to bring “In Search of the Promised Land” to the Portland Museum of Art through March 18.

The first star was a gift from Owen and Anna Wells to the museum in memory of philanthropist Elizabeth B. Noyce – the oil painting “Mount Katahdin from Millinocket Camp.”

The second star was a request to borrow the painting for the exhibit being organized by Berry-Hill Galleries in New York.

The museum agreed, and the show was presented at Berry-Hill, at Terra Museum of American Art in Chicago, and at the Portland Art Museum in Oregon before coming to Maine. With the third star, the support of Linda Bean Folkers, “In Search of the Promised Land” opened Jan. 18 in Portland.

The exhibit includes the massive “Niagara Falls from the American Side,” on loan from the National Gallery of Scotland.

Water coming over the falls crashes to the rocks below, while a rainbow is visible in the lower right-hand corner of the painting. Small figures of a man and a woman can be seen on a wooden lookout, and in the background the mist rises.

“How do you paint mist?” asked Jessica Nicoll, referring to Church’s reputation for capturing atmospheric conditions. Nicoll is chief curator at the museum in Portland.

Several of Church’s paintings are very large – the Niagara work is more than 8 feet tall. And certainly his subjects are large in scale – mountains, landscapes, icebergs, architecture, trees.

Nicoll called his works “just epic in every way, and just breathtaking in the way they are executed.”

“He’s one of the greatest painters of the 19th century in terms of technique,” she added.

Born in 1826 in Connecticut, Church is a member of the “second generation” of the Hudson River School, the landscape tradition connected with artists such as Thomas Cole.

Church, in fact, studied with Cole from age 18 to 20. It’s a good thing Church took that opportunity when it came, because Cole died in 1848.

The Church exhibit depicts many corners of the world, from Mexico and the Tropics to Athens and the Arctic.

“He had an explorer’s spirit,” Nicoll said. For Maine visitors to the exhibit, however, “the most obvious connection is the landscapes that inspired Church, really, throughout his career.”

In Maine, those locations included both Mount Desert Island and the Katahdin region.

Church first visited Mount Desert in 1850, making eight trips to the island in a dozen years. The cliffs of Penobscot Mountain are the subject of “Lake Scene in Mount Desert,” the 1851 painting in the exhibit.

Others making use of island views, “Coast Scene” and “The Wreck,” are included in the 200-page catalog, “Frederick Edwin Church: In Search of the Promised Land.”

Three paintings of Mount Katahdin are on display in Portland, a tribute to the area the artist first saw in 1852. Church loved the region so much, Nicoll said, that he made many trips there and built a camp on Millinocket Lake.

The current exhibit offers an 1853 painting of the mountain, owned by the Portland museum; an 1856 oil owned by Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass.; and of course the Wells gift, “Mount Katahdin from Millinocket Camp.”

Dated 1895, the latter painting took five years to complete and was a gift to Church’s wife, Isabel, on her 59th birthday.

The 1856 work depicts a canoe carrying three men – said to be Church, his traveling companion, writer Theodore Winthrop, and Cancut, their guide from Greenville.

The 1895 painting also has a canoe, this time with Church alone, looking toward the mountain.

The artist seems to use light differently in the three works – behind the mountain in 1853, on the mountain in 1856, and in 1895, possibly, in front of the mountain.

“He uses light very symbolically, as a divine eminence in the sky,” Nicoll said.

That was true throughout Church’s career, from the sun peeking through clouds in “Morning, Looking East over the Hudson Valley from the Catskill Mountains,” 1848, to light bathing the mountains and lake in “Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta,” 1883.

To memorialize his mentor, Thomas Cole, he also used crosses and cross shapes, such as a crosslike ship’s mast in a painting of an iceberg.

In some sense, Church’s paintings follow his travels – the East Coast in the late 1840s, South America in the 1850s, the sub-Arctic in 1859, Jamaica in 1865, his only trip to the Mediterranean and Europe from late 1867 to mid-1869, and in the last two decades of his life, Mexico.

“He was always in search of the sublime, that’s for sure,” commented Carl Little, public relations director for College of the Atlantic and former associate editor for Art in America.

“He was a little like Rockwell Kent in that he would go to the ends of the Earth for a great motif,” Little said.

The 1859 trip to Newfoundland and Labrador obviously made an impression on Church. The painter approached icebergs with the same sense of respect for grandeur as he had for mountains and other vistas.

On display are three such works, including “The Iceberg,” 1875, owned by the Terra Foundation for the Arts in Chicago.

Light falls only on the main promontory of the iceberg, shaped not unlike a mountain. A schooner nearby gives it scale.

Points of light in the sky also intrigued Church, from the northern lights to individual stars. And, as Nicoll said, such paintings could be symbolic.

An 1859 twilight painting, “The Evening Star,” was given to Church’s friend, sculptor Erastus Dow Palmer, in memory of the Palmer child that had died the year before.

The catalog pairs the work with “The Star in the East,” the 1860-61 work of the star that announced Jesus’ birth.

The back of the catalog shows Church’s “The Meteor of 1860.” He was apparently the only artist who painted the double-headed meteor, and the canvas hung in the bedroom of Church and his wife at Olana, the Persian-style mansion he built on the Hudson River.

The architecture and the home’s contents were considered an artistic work by Church, and the historic site is now open to the public.

Both Olana and the valley views that inspired some of Church’s painting are part of videos that accompany the exhibit in Portland.

The films allow visitors to see some of the canvases that rarely travel, Nicoll said, including his signature “Heart of the Andes.”

“It’s a way to see the full scope of his work,” she said.

South America is also represented in the exhibit by paintings such as “Morning in the Tropics,” an 1877 work owned by the National Gallery of Art; and two of peaks in Ecuador, “View of Cotopaxi” and “Mt. Chimborazo at Sunset.”

This particular “Morning in the Tropics,” a title Church used several times, shows equatorial scenery at its most lush. The presence of tiny birds makes the trees and foliage seem truly bigger than life.

The piece has been nicknamed “The River of Light.”

A feature of many Church works, one mentioned little by scholars, is the arch, whether natural or man-made.

“The Natural Bridge, Virginia,” 1852, shows a woman seated on the ground in front of the bridge, while a man, standing, raises his arm toward the structure.

Arches also are seen in some of Church’s paintings of Mexico, where he traveled several times during his final years, despite difficulties with arthritis and rheumatism.

The curved forms may show up as a central piece of architecture, support to a bridge, or shape of a door.

In “Church of San Diego, Cuautla, Mexico,” a man sits at the foot of the walls around the church, lending a sense of scale. Arches show up in the windows and wall panels.

The latest piece in the exhibit is “A View in Cuernavaca, Mexico,” painted during the last couple of years of Church’s life. It features a large arch through which the viewer can see part of another stone building, and, in the distance, a mountain.

In the stars, on a mountain, in the mist of a waterfall, through an arch, Frederic Edwin Church’s work was always “In Search of the Promised Land.”

The Portland Museum of Art, 7 Congress Square, is open 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday; 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Thursday and Friday. For information, call 773-6148, or check www.portlandmuseum.org. The exhibit catalog and videos are available in the museum gift shop.