LEARN: The Collections

Visitors touring beautiful Olana will see the paintings, sculpture and furnishings Frederic and Isabel Church acquired over the course of their lives, which surrounded them and their children, servants and guests in their daily life at Olana. The collection was described by a 19th century guest as, "a museum of fine arts rich in bronzes, paintings, sculptures and antique and artistic specimens from all over the world."

Today's visitor experience is remarkably unchanged, with the public encountering interiors that look as they did in the 1890s-- the virtually intact home of one of America's most important painters. The sheer richness and depth of the collections speak to Church's life-long interest in acquiring intriguing objects from around the world.The whole is an exemplary example of an early Aesthetic Movement interior.

Highlights of the collection include paintings by Frederic Church and fellow Hudson River School artists Martin Johnson Heade and Arthur Parton, and numerous works by his close friend sculptor Erastus Dow Palmer.


The eclectic assortment of furniture and art collected on his many travels abroad and purchased from the growing number of purveyors in New York City include, Middle Eastern carpets,
metalwork,ceramics and costumes; old master paintings; Mexican and colonial folk art; pre-Columbian art; and 19th century American and Oriental furniture.

Frederic Joseph Church, Plan of Olana, September 1886, 22 1/8 x 36 ¼ in., watercolor on paper, OL.1984.39

This striking watercolor plan by Frederic Joseph Church is a highlight of the 2012 Olana exhibition Life After Life: Preserving Olana, opening May 19 in the Sharp Family Gallery. It is on public display for the first time.

In 1886 Church’s eldest son, Frederic Joseph Church documented Olana, the three-dimensional masterpiece created by his father, illustrating the artist’s fairly completed vision for his property. This plan includes the elements of the 250-acre design: the farm complex and orchards, the man-made lake, meadows, parkland, native woodlands, and the main house—all connected by more than five miles of carriage roads. Historians have consulted this document to assist them with restoration plans for Olana’s landscape. With the use of contemporary measurement tools, we now know that this plan view is approximate—not fully to scale—yet this rendering has proved to be one of the most vital documents for Olana’s full restoration.

Only two years earlier, Church wrote his friend Erastus Dow Palmer about his active work on the landscape: I have made 1 ¾ miles of road this season, opening entirely new and beautiful views. I can make more and better landscapes in this way than tampering with canvas and paint in the studio.

Church intended Olana’s landscape as a work of art and as a way to experience views of the Hudson Valley and beyond. In planning the estate, he orchestrated more than five miles of winding carriage roads that offered composed views towards Massachusetts, Vermont, Connecticut and New York’s Hudson River Valley.

The artist designed the property with an eye toward agriculture and the cultivation of native species, and he included naturalistic elements such as benches, fences, and a summer house as well as fanciful elements such as a breed of donkey that he imported from the Middle East. The artist’s vision for the landscape included a ten acre lake, a significant design feature, which he began creating around 1864 by removing muck from the swampy ground. These integrated aspects of Olana are all wonderfully captured in Frederic Joseph’s watercolor.

A year after completing the plan for his father, Church’s son traveled out west, and by the fall of 1887 ending up in Seattle, Washington. Later, he would serve as a surveyor of Mason County, Washington. Frederic Joseph also worked as a guide for J. P. O’Neil, who conducted a government survey of the Olympic peninsula, the northwest corner of Washington State. His writing and photographs from this period were published; entertaining stories of canoe trips with Indian guides and fishing expeditions in wilderness streams. Surely, drafting the Olana plan provided some preparation for his later survey adventures.

Please visit the exhibition later this month to see this wonderful rendering of Church’s artistic masterpiece.