Frederic Edwin Church, a central figure in a group of artists known as the Hudson River School, became internationally renowned as a painter of monumental landscapes. The spectacular panoramas he painted in the 1840s through 1890s helped shape not only the cultural identity of the United States, but also of himself when he applied his vision as an artist to the house and 250-acre landscape that he named Olana, known today as Olana State Historic Site, a National Historic Landmark.
Olana’s designed landscape has been sensitively restored over the last ten years and can now be experienced by visitors very much as Church and his family experienced it in the 19th century. The new book: "Frederic Church’s Olana on the Hudson: Art Landscape Architecture," includes nearly fifty paintings and sketches by Church, alongside gorgeous photography by Larry Lederman and engaging essays by David Schuyler, Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, Stephen Hannock, and Thomas Woltz and Eleanor Jones Harvey who join us.
Eleanor Jones Harvey is senior curator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Her most recent project was the exhibition The Civil War and American Art, which was on view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2012–2013. Her current project is about the considerable impact of German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt on American art and culture.
Thomas L. Woltz leads the firm Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects (NBW) in applying design excellence to the creation and reinvigoration of public space — parks, urban plazas, campuses, and arboreta—and to the restoration of damaged ecological infrastructure within working farmland to create models of biodiversity and sustainable agriculture.
