There was once a time when people of an arty temperament spoke of “significant form.” This term, coined in 1913 by the Bloomsbury critic Clive Bell, referred to the pure form and color of a painted, drawn, or sculpted object, as opposed to the actual object that the form signified: A black mass might depict a dog, but it was the abstracted size and shape of the black mass, rather than the fact that it depicted a dog, that was the significant form.

Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900), one of the foremost painters of the Hudson River School, did not live long enough to read Clive Bell, and that is just as well. For he represented the precise antithesis of all that Bell and the other modernists valued in the visual arts. A passionate positivist and, in an American context, an eminent Victorian, he wanted his landscapes of the Hudson River, the Mediterranean, the Amazon, and the North Pole to seem so real that, with favorable lighting, the viewer might just imagine he was standing in the heart of the Andes or amid the frondy vales of the Adirondacks.

Church was precocious enough, and he lived long enough, that the art world fundamentally changed during his lifetime. In the late 1840s, he produced his first landscapes — a number of which are included at the Adelson Galleries’ retrospective. At the time, America was well-nigh primitive in its cultivation of the visual arts. By the end of his life, however, the Americans of the Gilded Age owned some of the finest Old Master collections assembled in 100 years, and their Impressionist holdings surpassed any in France itself.

Though some American painters, such as George Inness, and expatriates, such as Whistler and Sargent, zealously embraced these new tendencies in art, Church was having none of it. For him, to suggest a leaf or to give his impression of a leaf rather than to paint the leaf itself was almost un-American. In works such as “Pinchancha” (1867), you could, if you really wanted, count the leaves on the trees of his Amazonian rain forests. As you might expect from such a subject, there are quite a lot of them, and each one has been faithfully and indefatigably rendered by Church.

This passion for recording nature as it was remained a constant throughout Church’s life, but it would not be fair to say that his art was static. His earlier works retain the faintest residue of the pietism that informed the Romanticist landscapes of Thomas Cole, his teacher.

By that view, God shed his grace upon the Alleghenies, and it was the painter’s duty to depict that bounty, even to the point of inventing hokey New World mythologies. In truth, Church quickly outgrew such things, rapidly maturing into an artist of far greater skill than his master. His religion as well — inspired by Ruskin, the Transcendentalists, and Baron Humboldt — was re-invented as a higher form of abstraction. Thus, works such as “Syrian Landscape” (1873) are infused with a divinity expressed through light and rocks and vast scenes of desolation, rather than through the robed figures that had once floated down the glassy rivers of Thomas Cole.

In time, a romantic element was re-introduced into Church’s art. He loses nothing of his sharp, inexorable precision, but he redirects it along the paths of poetry. A good example of this is “Marine Sunset” (1881–82), which depicts the churning sea and a single ship awash in the brilliant vermilion of the setting sun.

At the same time as he paints such works, however, Church can turn out depictions of the Acropolis that are among his weakest efforts. Despite a slightly looser brushwork, the entire point of these unimaginative pictures is to look like a photograph.

But if you look hard enough, you will find something like “significant form” stirring in some of his latest works. A few of them, it is true, are mere studies, which for him, in a sense, didn’t count. But whatever he was up to in his “Clouds over Olana” (1872), he depicts his famous home on the Hudson as a Dr. Seuss-like castle perched upon a round hill against the setting sun, and the result is potently enchanting.

But there is nothing unfinished about a related painting, “View from Olana in the Snow” (c. 1873), perhaps the best work in the entire exhibition. Here amid the sinuous paths through the snow and the spare branches of the trees in the middle ground and the merging of the violet mountains with the pristine sky in the distance, Church achieves a perfect union of his will to record reality and the higher callings of his art.

Even at his most pedantic, in those countable leaves that make up the trees of his Amazonian rain forests, Church clearly feels such a hard-bitten passion for what he wants that, against all the odds, he bursts through, on more than one occasion, to real artistic consequence.