The Heart of the Andes is an oil painting on canvas completed by the American landscape painter Frederic Edwin Church in 1859. It shows an idealized view of the Andes, which Church visited in 1853 and 1857. When it was first exhibited, the painting was a popular success, viewed by more than 12,000 people in a little less than a month. Poetry and music were written about it, and the painting was ultimately sold for $10,000 – at that time the highest price ever paid for a work by a living American artist. The Heart of the Andes was bequeathed by the owner, Margaret Dows, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art upon her death in 1909.
