Sightlines on the Hudson by Mary Roberts

September 9, 2020

Mary Roberts is the John Schaeffer Professor of Art History at the University of Sydney. She is a specialist in nineteenth-century European Orientalist and late Ottoman art, with particular expertise in the history of artistic exchanges and the culture of travel. In 2016 she was awarded the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand’s Book Prize for Istanbul Exchanges. Ottomans, Orientalists and Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture (University of California Press, 2015). Her first book, Intimate Outsiders: The Harem in Ottoman and Orientalist Art and Travel Literature, was published by Duke University Press in 2007. She has co-edited four other books and has been a Getty Scholar, CASVA Senior Fellow, YCBA Fellow and Clark-Oakley Fellow. Her next book is on artists as collectors of Islamic art.

“About an hour this side of Albany is the Center of the world – I own it.”

Frederic Church to Erastus Dow Palmer, July 7, 1869

What kind of world is it that Frederic Church was creating in his Persian-inspired home on the Hudson? This lecture proposes some answers to this question by analysing three of the interior sightlines within his home and considering the way each distinctively engages with visual cultures of the Near East. First, the sitting room: I tease out the significance of Church’s painting, El Khasné, Petra, in this space by studying his drawings made while travelling and the written account of that journey. Second, the court hall: paying particular attention to the optical effects Church was creating with his staircase, my study of the preparatory drawings for this part of the room reveals the diverse Islamic secular and religious visual sources he was translating into this focal point of his orientalist interior. Third, the fireplace sightline in one of the upstairs bedrooms: this brings into consideration an artist who was Church’s contemporary – the ceramicist Ali Mohammed Isfahani – whose work also circulated within global networks of patronage. Through this focus on some of Olana’s object worlds, its sightlines and architectural translations of eastern ornament, I explore the cultural politics of Church’s practice of worlding.