The American painters Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900) and Mark Rothko (1903–1970) were separated by 103 years and lived in very different worlds. Church, a central figure in the Hudson River School of landscape painters, explored the divinity inherent in nature. Rothko, who lived through the devastation of two World Wars, purged his paintings of references to the external world. And yet both artists—Church in his beatific vistas and Rothko in his intense color fields—touched transcendence. In this exhibition, also accessible as a virtual viewing room, 17 works by Church are in dialogue with 10 by Rothko. What a conversation that is. —E.C.