The painters of the Hudson River School loved nature. The American landscape, in its variety and majesty, became their subject. These artists, including George Inness, Thomas Cole, Frederic Church, and Louis Rémy Mignot (1831-1870), showcased Nature's beauty, sometimes in pure representation, sometimes replete with allegory. Thomas Cole taught Frederic Church; in turn, Church mentored Mignot, who accompanied the elder painter on his 1857 trip to Ecuador. Mignot, inhabiting the fringes of the Hudson River group, did not quite adhere to the typical background of the other painters, who were mostly reared in the northeast United States. A first-generation American of French ancestry and a Roman Catholic, Mignot was born in Charleston, South Carolina. His education, opposed by his merchant father—a confectioner—took place in the Netherlands, at The Hague, after his father's death. Despite these fundamental differences, Mignot's work echoed the focus, the intensity, and the grand scale of the paintings by his Hudson River School colleagues.