Olana University

Upload date: 2020
By William Coleman

Olana’s Director of Collections and Exhibitions William L. Coleman, Ph.D. focuses on Tropical Orchid by Martin Johnson Heade. This painting testifies to the complex friendship between artists Martin Heade and Frederic Church and served as inspiration for the exhibition Cross Pollination: Heade, Cole, Church, and Our Contemporary Moment, which ran from June to October of 2021.

Publication date: 2018
Photographed by Larry Lederman, Edited by Karen Zukowski and Julia B. Rosenbaum

An in-depth look inside Olana, one of America’s greatest estates, which was designed and built by Frederic Church, the most renowned of the Hudson River School painters.

Air date: 2016

Explore Olana, the home and studio of Hudson River School painter Frederic Edwin Church. Discover Church’s original vision for the home and learn about preservation and restoration work including efforts to restore the landscape to Church’s original design. See how his home and artwork have played a role in preserving the view shed of the Hudson River Valley.

Text by Suzanne Turner Associates. This timeline is an excerpt from Olana’s 2015 Strategic Landscape Design Plan by Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects and The LA Group.

Publication date: 2014
By Evelyn D. Trebilcock

This article looks at the relationship between Lockwood de Forest (1850-1932) Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900). De Forest was among the few artists that Church chose to encourage and mentor, and in time, their relationship grew into one of collaboration. (6 pages)

Publication date: 2013
By Evelyn D. Trebilcock

In 1877, Frederic E. Church traveled by railroad, wagon, and sled to paint on one of the highest peaks in New England. His oil sketches were included in the past exhibition Maine Sublime. This article looks at the art that resulted from Church’s Maine travels. (6 pages)

Publication date: 2010
By Daniel W. Bigler

Olana Historic Site Assistant Daniel Bigler’s 2010 paper on Irish servants in the 19th-century Hudson Valley is our best source on the lives and accommodations of the servants of Olana in relation to other country houses of the period. (37 pages)

Date: 2010
By Amy Griffin

This document explores the role archaeology plays in the restoration, interpretation, and preservation of Frederic Church’s Olana. (3 pages)

Publication date: 2009
By Robert Titus

Written for Columbia Greene Media by Robert Titus in 2009, this article is about rocks and geology of Olana and Church’s planned views. (4 pages)

Publication date: 2003
By Robert Titus

“An Unplanned View” was written for The Independent by Robert Titus in 2003. The document explores the planned and unplanned views at Olana with special attention to the Church’s South Porch. (4 pages)

Report date: 2001

Part I includes a narrative history of Frederic Church and many family members, including chapters on: the Churches’ religious beliefs, public and private reactions to the new Olana home, the raising of children at Olana, the Churches as collectors, guests at Olana, daily life at Olana, life of domestic servants at Olana, illnesses of Frederic and Isabel Church, the late paintings of Church, background on the furnishings of Olana, and Louis and Sally Church as stewards of Olana. (664 pages)

Report date: 2001

Part II of the Furnishings Report discusses the function in the 19th century of each room on the tour floor, noteworthy objects in those rooms, and objects that are reproductions of originals. Included are porches, piazzas, and outdoor rooms; the vestibule; the East parlor; the court hall; the sitting room; the studio; the corridor; the library; the cloak hall; the butler’s pantry; the dining room/gallery; and the laundry. NOTE that this volume does not discuss rooms now on our tour plan on the 2nd floors of the main house, such as the Churches’ bedrooms. (588 pages)

Report date: 2001

This report describes the 1886-88 planting of the “Victorian” flower garden that sits adjacent to the East Lawn, southeast of the main house, as well as updates made to the garden in the 1970s and the TOP project of 2001. Plant species for the original garden are included, as are photos from the 1980s. (Note: The quality of this PDF is poor and parts of the document are not searchable). (49 pages)

Report date: 1996
By Robert M. Toole

Documents the property history, intended use and design appearance of the Olana landscape during the residency of Church and his family, starting in 1860, as well as during the nine decades after Church’s death in 1900.

Also describes land acquisitions and includes dozens of period maps and photographs of the property. This volume also traces the history of landscape gardening on both sides of the Atlantic prior to Church. (300 pages)

Publication date: 1995
By Bethany Astrachan

A source on the ideas that shaped the Olana landscape, especially the transition in the ideologies of wilderness from places of waste and danger to Edenic sites of contact with the divine. Not without its faults but useful for the primary sources it compiles. (106 pages)

Publication date: 1994

This is the largest project undertaken to date on Frederic Edwin Church’s artworks at Olana. Divided into 16 chronological sections, it covers 736 drawings, paintings, and prints, spanning nearly 60 years of his life. The items, each of them illustrated in Volume II, range from doodles in his schoolboy textbooks and exercise books, to student works done under Thomas Cole, to important studio paintings exhibited during Church’s lifetime, and pencil sketches and finished paintings executed in Mexico as late as two years before his death in April 1900. The holdings are most concentrated at the beginning of Church’s career, between 1844 and 1850, and toward the end, between 1880 and 1898, but all phases of his travels and his art are represented, including preparations for his major studio paintings.

Volume I presents two introductory essays about Church and the development of Olana, including one by David Huntington, PLUS descriptions of every work created by Church that is part of the Olana State Historic Site collection, with accession numbers. (619 pages)

Publication date: 1994

Volume II includes a mixture of color and black-and-white plates for all the works referenced in Volume I. (492 pages)

Report date: 1993
By Robert M. Toole

This document looks at Phase IV, Part 4 of the Landscape Master Restoration Plan, The Farm, prepared by Landscape Architect Robert M. Toole in 1993. (22 pages)

Publication date: 1989
By Franklin Kelly

Franklin Kelly’s NGA catalogue for the 1989 NGA Frederic Church exhibition, which includes an early version of Jim Ryan’s “Frederic Church’s Olana: Architecture and Landscape as Art; Debra Rindge’s chronology of FEC’s life/work; and an annotated version of the unfinished c. 1900 biography by [Church’s friend] Charles Dudley Warner. We of course have copies in the library, but this is handy if you’re not in the house! (212 pages)

Publication date: 1966
By David Huntington

This is the publication Huntington’s PhD dissertation from Yale University and represents the first major monograph on Church. The emphasis is on the highlights of his career, on his successive concepts of the work of art, and on the role which he played in the cultural life of his day. Huntington offers detailed visual analysis of major Church paintings. (207 pages)

Dates: Emma Carnes Diary, 1882-85; Frederic Church Quotes, 1864-96; FEC Letters, 1896

Includes:

• Quotes from Emma Carnes’s diary that reference carriages, wagons, or carts at Olana.
• Quotes from Frederic Church that reference donkeys, carriages, vehicles, and other experiences driving around the Olana property.
• Letters from FEC to Downie about acquisition of a carriage and appropriate prices for such purchases.
• Photographs of various carriages in use at Olana during FEC’s lifetime. (26 pages total)

Contains quotes by Frederic Church and scholars relevant to Landscape Tour Guides. (6 pages)

A guide to interpreting the view from the back of Church Hill. (3 pages)

An outline for a tour of Olana’s farm, prepared by Dan Bigler. Covers Cosy Cottage, Barnyard, Kitchen Garden, and Lake. (2 pages)