Frederic Church's Olana:

The landscape, farm, house and collections that comprise Olana are a work of art conceived and executed by the preeminent mid-19th-century American landscape painter Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900). Considered one of the most important artistic residences in the United States, Olana is a landmark of Picturesque landscape gardening with a Persian-inspired house at its summit, embracing unrivaled panoramic views of the Hudson Valley. A rare American confluence of art and farming, aesthetics and conservation, landscape painting and landscape design, Olana represents a masterpiece of human creative genius.

Frederic Edwin Church was a student of Thomas Cole and a major figure in the Hudson River School of landscape painting. Built high on a hill between 1870 and 1891, Olana holds lordly sway over sweeping vistas of the Catskill Mountains and Hudson River. Today, Olana is a New York State Historic Site visited annually by over 150,000 people, making it one of the most popular tourist destinations in the Hudson Valley and upstate New York. Called by Church the Center of the World, Olana's grand house and 250 acres of romantically designed grounds are a personal vision of harmony between man and the American landscape a perfect Eden of picturesque beauty, as one 1891 visitor described it. This book tells Olana's remarkable story.

To say that Olana is the single most important artistic residence in the United States and one of the most significant in the world, is to state the obvious. To say that it is a place of the rarest, most profound, and most moving beauty and complexity and that it is a place that must be experienced to be fully understood and appreciated, is more to the point. In the end, though, one can only say that Olana is unique. From the introduction by Franklin Kelly, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

"The book is an excellent keepsake for anyone who has ever visited Olana, and will make you want to go if you haven't had the opportunity." Antiques and The Arts Weekly "This book will inspire readers to visit Olana. The modern photographs are so achingly vivid that people who have visited Olana will think they are back there."Schenectady Sunday Gazette Paper, 8 1/2 x 11, 104 pages, 74 photographs (31 in full-colour )
$21.95, ISBN: 1-883789-28-1