Frederic Church’s Middle Eastern Costume Collection: Its Inspiration and Impact

June 24, 2020

Hanan Munayyer is President of the Palestinian Heritage Foundation and a scholar and curator specializing in Palestinian and other Arab traditional dress. Her many exhibition credits include an important contribution as an advisor and essayist for Olana’s 2018 exhibition Costume and Custom: Middle Eastern Threads at Olana, which was guest curated by textile historian Lynne Z. Bassett. She has lectured widely for universities and museums and she co-produced and wrote the script of the 1990 documentary Palestinian Costumes and Embroidery: A Precious Legacy. Since 2009, Ms. Munayyer has been a member of the New Jersey Arab-American Heritage Commission, a state entity to which she was appointed by the governor. In 2011, she published the award-winning book Traditional Palestinian Costume: Origins and Evolution with Interlink Books, the result of 24 years of research about the origins of Middle Eastern textile arts and the evolution of Palestinian costumes and crafts.

As Frederic and Isabel Church travelled in Syria, Lebanon and Palestine in 1868, they commented on the “picturesque costumed individuals” (Isabel’s diary, 1868) they saw, inspiring them to bring back to Olana some costumes that are now some of the oldest extant Palestinian and Syrian costume items in any collection. They were featured in Church’s paintings of the Middle East, and were used in “a la Turque” parties at Olana. This collection will be reviewed in this presentation.

Frederic Church’s fascination with architectural decorations of the mansions in Damascus and Jerusalem that inspired the design of Olana also resulted in the acquisition of some “stones from a house in Damascus” (Church letter to W. Osborn, 1868) ) and numerous wall and door designs from Jerusalem that are on display at numerous locations at Olana. These will be highlighted.