Olana—the historic estate of Hudson River school artist Frederic Edwin Church, with its faux-Persian mansion surrounded by a landscape devised by the painter as a living work of art—is hosting winter art exhibitions for the first time…
Arts and Sciences
A new exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution examines the influence of naturalist Alexander von Humboldt on the American arts. In focus here: the landscapes of Frederic Church
Frederic Church’s Olana on the Hudson
“Almost an hour this side of Albany is the Center of the World,” wrote Frederic Edwin Church (1826– 1900) to his friend sculptor Erastus Dow Palmer. He added: “I own it.” Church, preeminent among the Hudson River school painters, was referring to Olana, his magnificent “Persian” style mansion and the surrounding 250 mountaintop acres of landscape he subtly designed.
Frederic Church in the cradles of Christianity and Western civilization
Preeminent member of the Hudson River school Frederic Edwin Church is the subject of a show currently running at Reynolda House Museum of American Art in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
Bringing back Olana
The fiftieth anniversary of the rescue of Church’s exotic masterpiece finds it and its spectacular landscape more popular than ever with lovers of art, architecture, and ecology. View looking south to the Hudson River from the bell tower of the main house at Olana. Andy Wainwright 2004. Just south of Hudson, New York, a signpost on Route 9G marks the …
Poetry and painting
Among this year’s best surprises is the moving exhibition Bold, Cautious, True: Walt Whitman and American Art of the Civil War Era, which opened during the summer at the Dixon Gallery and Gardens in Memphis, Tennessee, and remains on view at the Katonah Museum of Art in Katonah, New York, through January 24, 2010. Taking its title from a Whitman …