Olana State Historic Site - Landscape

Landscape

Over the last forty years of his life, Frederic Church created a 250-acre (1.0 km2) designed landscape at Olana. In an 1884 letter, Church wrote of his work on the grounds at Olana, “I can make more and better landscapes in this way than by tampering with canvas and paint in the studio.” Today Olana is known as one of the most important surviving Picturesque landscapes in the United States. Produced during the same period with the same aesthetic and ideological motivations, the landscape at Olana has been compared to Central Park, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux.

Church began the physical landscape design at Olana by searching three years for the ideal property. He had walked and sketched throughout much of New England and elsewhere by that time, but his formative two years studying with Thomas Cole in nearby Catskill, New York, brought him back to the Hudson Valley. The Church estate covers a series of small knolls rising up to the Sienghenbergh – Dutch for “Long Hill” – where the main house is sited. From various points around the property, one has views of the Hudson River, the Catskill, Taconic and Berkshire Mountain ranges, as well as New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont.

In 1860, Frederic Church made his initial acquisition of a 126 acre (50.99 ha) farm, which he developed in to a ferme ornée, an ornamental farm. Around Cosy Cottage, a profitable 15.5 acre (6.3 ha) orchard and 4.3 acres (1.7 ha) of vegetable and fruit gardens were created in addition to pastures and crop land, each with a distinct visual character. The family always called their place “the farm,” but when he bought the land, Church took about half out of active agricultural production to create a landscaped park. In this park, Church planted thousands of native trees (many transplanted from elsewhere on site); created a 10-acre (40,000 m2) lake from a swamp; built a freestanding studio, summer house, and rustic benches and railings; and designed five miles (8.05 km) of carriage drives paved in crushed red shale mined on site. Church strategically acquired additional adjacent parcels until his property encompassed 250.2 acres (101.3 ha) and the top of the hill where the main house at Olana now stands.

To conceal, reveal and frame vistas of his own property and the wider Hudson Valley, Church combined natural landforms with the careful layout of carriage drives and extensive plantings of trees and shrubs, . Frederick Law Olmsted thought of such landscapes as “pictures” through which people might wander. In addition to entertaining often, the Churches opened the Olana grounds to the public. From the popular carriage drives, visitors experienced the artist’s landscape vignettes almost as cinema, in a sequence choreographed by Church. The ultimate aspect of Church’s designed landscape is the view from the main house. There, the ground drops away sharply, the Hudson widens to two miles (3 km) across, and the Catskills rise up steeply. Like Church’s painted views of Niagara Falls, Canadian icebergs, and South American volcanoes this scene captures the majesty of nature. For the artist and his contemporaries, this vista also captured the essence of their new nation with references to pioneering history, present economic strength, and the distinguished literary and artistic legacies of the region’s Knickerbocker Group and Hudson River School.