Frederic Church's Olana:
Architecture and Landscape as Art
by James Anthony Ryan
Named for a fortress treasure-house in ancient Persia, Olana was the home of Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900), one of America's most important artists, 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 Persian-style 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 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, Curator of American and British Paintings, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Paper, 8 1/2 x 11, 104 pages, 74 photographs (31 in full-colour )
$21.95, ISBN: 1-883789-28-1
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