Frederick Church and Olana

Frederick Church and Olana. . Olana was the home of Hudson River School artist Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900). Church's great talent was recognized early in his life. By age 20, he had his own studio and was a well-known artist. He traveled extensively in North and South America, recording the wild natural beauty of the New World. In the late 1850s and 1860s, Church was the most famous American artist in the United States and Europe. His paintings of North and South American landscapes were viewed by thousands of people all over the world. Today Church is considered one of the most important artists of the Americas. , As a student of Thomas Cole, founder of the Hudson River School, Church stayed in Catskill with Cole at the artist's home, Cedar Grove. Church studied and painted in the Catskill area from 1844-1846. He first visited the site that would later become Olana while sketching and studying with Cole. , One of Church's greatest contributions to 19th-century art is Olana. Church and his wife, Isabel Carnes Church (1836-1899), began creating Olana in 1860 with the acquisition of the farm and culminating with the construction of the main house in 1870. Designed with thoughtfulness and vision, Olana includes a Persian-style house, an artist's studio, romantically landscaped grounds, and dramatic vistas of the Hudson Valley and Catskill Mountains. Olana embodies the ideas and plans of such great 19th-century architects as Hunt, Vaux, Downing, and Olmsted. Their ideas, and the artistry and showmanship of Frederic Church, became Olana, a site that captures all that was best of the 19th-century aesthetic of The Picturesque, The Beautiful, and The Sublime. , Olana remained in the Church family until 1966, when the property was saved from auction by Olana Preservation Inc. (a volunteer group led by David C. Huntington, the first of a new generation of Church scholars, art dealer Stuart Feld, and a field of local notables) and the State of New York under Governor Nelson Rockefeller. Now a New York State Historic Site, Olana remains today much as it was when Church and his wife created it.