![]() The family's wealth allowed Frederic to pursue his interest in art from a very early age. His mother's brother was Adrian Janes, who owned an iron foundry that constructed the U.S. His father was successful in business as a silversmith and jeweler and was a director at several financial firms. Frederic had two sisters and no surviving brothers. In his prime, he was one of the most famous painters in the United States.įrederic Edwin Church was a direct descendant of Richard Church, a Puritan pioneer from England who accompanied Thomas Hooker on the original journey through the wilderness from Massachusetts to what would become Hartford, Connecticut. He debuted some of his major works in single-painting exhibitions to a paying and often enthralled audience in New York City. Church's paintings put an emphasis on realistic detail, dramatic light, and panoramic views. He was a central figure in the Hudson River School of American landscape painters, best known for painting large landscapes, often depicting mountains, waterfalls, and sunsets. Today, visitors to Olana are also touched by the sense of home they find there, where the creations of people and nature, the human and the divine, merge in domestic and artistic harmony.Frederic Edwin Church (– April 7, 1900) was an American landscape painter born in Hartford, Connecticut. Increasingly, Olana is recognized as Church’s last great artistic effort carried out, not in paint, but in landscape, architecture, and interior design. from the Introduction by Franklin Kelly. In the end, though, one can only say that Olana is unique. ![]() To say that it is a place of the rarest, most profound, and most moving beauty and complexity and that it is a place that must be experienced to be fully understood and appreciated, is more to the point. ![]() To say that Olana is the single most important artistic residence in the United States and one of the most significant in the world, is to state the obvious. Ryan’s essay on the design and construction of Olana between 18 and the life and work of Frederic Church has been enhanced by an afterword on the subsequent history of Olana from Church’s death in 1900 to the present, written by David Seamon, professor of architecture at Kansas State University, and Dr. Under his twenty years of directorship, Olana became one of the most significant artist’s homes and studios, both nationally and internationally. The author of Frederic Church’s Olana, the late James Ryan, was site manager of Olana from 1979 to 1999. His son and daughter, aged two-and-a-half and five months respectively, died of diphtheria within six days of each other in 1865.Ĭhurch continued to paint, but more and more his creative energies went into the transformation of his modest hilltop home into a towering Persian fortress/treasure house and the extensive grounds into what one 1891 visitor described as a “perfect Eden of picturesque beauty.” What Church called “the Center of the World” became a personal vision of harmony between people and the American landscape, his “last great work,” according to art historians. In 1859, when Church was thirty-three, he completed the painting Heart of the Andes and sold it for $10,000.00, the highest price at that time ever paid for a painting by a living American artist.Ĭhurch had attained the pinnacle of the art world. When Church was twenty-three, he was elected to full membership in the Academy-still today the youngest artist ever to be so honored. Just one year later, he made his professional debut as a painter with the exhibition of one of his works at New York’s National Academy of Design. When Church was eighteen years old, he began studying under Thomas Cole, founder of the Hudson River School of landscape painting. It has been called “the single most important artistic residence in the United States.”įrederic Edwin Church was the most famous and successful American painter of the mid-1800s and one of America’s most important artists. Olana, the Persian-style house and romantically-designed grounds built high on a hilltop just south of the city of Hudson by Hudson River School painter Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900) draws 150,000 visitors annually and has been one of the most recognized landmarks along the Hudson River for over 125 years. (The collection of the Albany Institute of History & Art) ![]() “Almost an hour this side of Albany is the Center of the World-I own it.”-Frederic Edwin Church in a letter to Erastus Palmer, 7 July 1869. ![]()
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