Frederic Church Week: Saturday

Between 1860 and 1900, Frederic Church, his wife Isabel, and their four children created a 250-acre living landscape. Church named the property Olana, which stands today as the most important artist’s home, studio, and designed landscape in the United States.

Church designed Olana as a holistic environment integrating his ideas about art, architecture, landscape design, and environmental conservation. Olana’s 250-acre landscape, with five miles of carriage roads and a Persian-inspired house at its summit, embraces embraces unrivalled panoramic views of the Hudson Valley and Catskill Mountains.

Church added a studio wing to the west end of the house in the late 1880s, incorporating a tower with a glazed observation room from which he could survey the landscape and the sky. The house would even appear in some of his works, such as the 1872 sketch Clouds over Olana, which shows the house looking rather modest beneath towering Cumulus congestus clouds. Perhaps this was Church’s way of acknowledging that even an environment as ambitious as Olana is put in perspective by the majesty of the sky.