Olana State Historic Site - Historiography

Historiography

Olana has been the subject of scholarly study by a succession of students and experts on Church's life. David C. Huntington's cataloging and analysis in the mid-1960s is acknowledged as the first foundational work. Huntington is credited not only with saving the site from public auction but with bringing Church's reputation from obscurity to prominence in relation to the Hudson River School. Huntington theorized that the sketches and paintings that Church displayed at Olana, ones he either kept outright or reacquired, were key to understanding the painter's personal values.

Huntington supposed that the name "Olana" was a corruption of an ancient language—an article to that effect had been published in the 1890s in the Boston Herald and believed for many decades. In 1966, Huntington re-established this story, writing that the Arabic word Al'ana, meaning "our place on high", was possibly transliterated to Latin as "Olana". Art historian and Church scholar Gerald L. Carr found no confirmation that the Churches ever considered this meaning; instead, Carr believed the answer to be in a copy of Strabo's Geographica in Olana's library, a multi-volume reference work given by Isabel Church to her husband on Christmas 1879. One volume of this classic Greek work describes a fortified treasure-house named Olana, or Olane, situated on a hillside near the Araxes River in Artaxata, a city in modern-day Armenia, close to the eastern border of Turkey and the northwestern arm of Iran. Carr assumed that the Churches began calling their residence "Olana" after reading Strabo. John Ashbery agreed, writing in 1997 that Strabo's Artaxata "was one of the supposed sites of the Garden of Eden", and that the Churches must have felt kinship with both the idyllic and the protected qualities of ancient Olana.

Olana was featured in Bob Vila's A&E Network four-part production, Guide to Historic Homes of America. For the first episode, on the subject of historic homes in the Northeastern U.S., Vila and his crew traveled to five locations containing historic structures. Olana was saved for the last segment of the two-hour-long program—the residence was described as a "palatial amalgam of Middle-Eastern and European influences".