Webinars

Lockwood de Forest (1850-1932), a painter and interior designer started his artistic career painting with Frederic Church at Olana. De Forest’s main contribution to Olana came after he set up an studio of mastercraftmen in the Indian city of Ahmedabad, in Gujarat in 1880-81 for the production of woodwork, metalwork, and other decorative designs. This talk will go inside Olana on a virtual tour of elements and furniture provided by de Forest, mostly from his Indian studio, supplemented by images of other work by de Forest and related Indian sources, with special reference to how he and Church collaborated at Olana.

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.

The 250 acres of land that comprise Frederic Church’s OLANA became the canvas for his pioneering endeavors in landscape architecture. Participants will learn about the geological history of Olana and the forces that shaped the 19th-century Hudson River School artist’s designed landscape.

In the summer of 1859, Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900)—the most celebrated American landscape painter of his time—journeyed to Newfoundland and Labrador to study and sketch icebergs. These studies, drawn from Cooper Hewitt’s collection of over 2,000 drawings by Church, offer us a moment to reflect with reverence on the fragility of our natural world. Join curator Caitlin Condell as she gives a virtual tour of the exhibition After Icebergs at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum and tells the story of how Church’s sketches came to Cooper Hewitt.

This lecture presents aspects of Cash’s ongoing research into Frederic Church’s paintings and drawings of Niagara Falls, focusing on one of the most important landscape paintings in the history of American art—and an emblem of the Corcoran Gallery of Art’s historic legacy at the National Gallery of Art—Niagara (1857). Featuring the rich holdings of art and archival materials held by Olana, the lecture will reveal the artist’s working methods in creating Niagara and his two other large-scale exhibition paintings of the falls; these date to 1862 (unlocated) and 1867 (National Galleries of Scotland).

This talk focuses on the extraordinary role played by Frederic Church (1826-1900) as a founding trustee of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Church helped to establish the broad vision and ambition for the museum during his thirty-year tenure as a Met trustee by adding works of art to the fledgling collections, and inspiring a legacy for American art that led to a series of important gifts of major paintings, culminating in a transformative 150th anniversary promised gift.

This talk places Olana in a transatlantic history of artist’s houses, and of painter-architects, with the goal of showing the place we love is not an intriguing anomaly but rather the crystallization of widely held dreams. Case studies will include the houses of Peter Paul Rubens in what is now Belgium, John Constable’s family home in the East of England, and William Birch’s “Springland” near Philadelphia, a largely forgotten early American artist’s house that shows the roots of the Olana ideal even in this country. Of particular interest will be the lost houses of Frederic Church’s fellow travelers Albert Bierstadt and Jasper Francis Cropsey.

In this webinar, Dr. Eleanor Jones Harvey shares her once in a lifetime exhibition Alexander Von Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature, and Culture, which is currently installed at the Smithsonian American Art Museum with plans to open to the public later this year and to remain on view through early January. She will start by sharing some behind the scenes perspective on the years of diplomacy and sleuthing required to assemble this exciting project, to which Frederic Church and Olana are central, including a number of loans from our collection.

Dr. Christine Oaklander is an independent art historian and private art consultant with over thirty years of expertise in the field of American art. Here she speaks on the lifelong friendship between Frederic Church and William Henry Osborn, Church’s principal patron.

After Church’s daughter-in-law died in 1964, having preserved Olana for decades with her husband Louis Palmer Church, her heirs put Olana on the market. An option granted by the Sally Church estate set the race for funds against a ticking clock. David Huntington, a junior professor at Smith College, led the effort, beginning with the restoration of Church’s reputation. Huntington’s group prevented the sale from going forward, raised funds for its purchase, and eventually persuaded Governor Nelson Rockefeller to sign legislation permitting the state to acquire it.

Professor of Art History, Graduate Center, City University of New York, Katherine Manthorne, focuses on Cayambe by Frederic Church. She speaks about Frederic Church’s close study of nature and how he forged a tradition of traveler-art that spans from the 19th century to today.

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 upcoming exhibition, Cross Pollination, opening in 2021.

A brief history of Frederic Church’s OLANA.