How Olana, Frederic Church’s Home, Survived the Bulldozer and Thrived

A Moorish Revival marvel, Olana is a New York State/private partnership with big plans for the future.

L ast week I went to Olana, Frederic Church’s house and landscape in Hudson, in upstate New York. Church (1826–1900) is the artist who, more than anyone, made the Hudson River School a movement. His teacher and mentor, Thomas Cole (1801–1848), is America’s first landscape superstar, but Cole, putting aside moments when he truly goes native, is the offspring of English Romanticism.

I’ll write two stories on Olana. This weekend, I’ll write a bit about Cole and Church and the fantastic polychrome Orientalist villa that Church built in the early 1870s and mostly designed himself. Next week, I’ll write about Olana as an early-American masterpiece of landscape architecture, designed by Church with many of the same philosophical ingredients that Frederick Law Olmsted, his near-exact contemporary, used. Olana overlooks an ever-changing, atmospheric 360-degree panorama.

Olana is a fascinating story. It’s an early, harrowing case of historic preservation as it came close to demolition. It’s also a happy case of New York State government’s actually succeeding, and unabashedly so. Olana is owned by the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation, and Historic Preservation, which also owns about 40 other historic sites and a first-class conservation department caring for their art and architecture.

I want to introduce Cole for a few reasons. Yes, Church was his student, and Cole gets the credit for siring the Hudson River School. Cole’s house and studio, recently and beautifully restored, are in the town of Catskill, a short drive across the Rip Van Winkle Bridge over the Hudson from Olana. Cole, while certainly an American artist, is a bit of an outlier. He was English by birth and came to America as a young man. His ideal picture conveys contentment leavened by wistfulness and loss. Cole never painted a scene from Shakespeare, but I’ve always thought of him in terms of the Shakespearean cosmology of four humors — choleric, melancholic, phlegmatic, and sanguine — and the rule of balance. If the humors are out of whack, things go downhill. Hence, The Course of Empire, one of the few truly loud, boisterous things he paints, concerns the bitter wages of imbalance, of hubris, self-aggrandizement, greed, and unruliness. Otherwise, Cole is an American Wordsworth, in paint. He does elegies and laments.

Church is American through and through. Boundless, patriotic, and, here and there, flashy, Church’s paintings have no regrets. His earliest, such as Hooker and Company Journeying through the Wilderness, from 1846, and West Rock, New Haven, from 1849, are history-as-landscape with no apologies and no sentimentality. Church was born in Hartford to an old Connecticut family. He’s a Yankee painter in his particularism. He will fudge here and there but likes crisp details and plenty of them. He’s like P. T. Barnum, too. Barnum’s another Connecticut boy. Church, like Barnum, revels in spectacle. He puts on a great show, spares no bell and no whistle. No freaks allowed, but Church, like Barnum, presents an abundance of natural diversity.

The Heart of the Andes, from 1859, is the zenith of Church’s South American pictures. It’s big, dramatic, exotic, and it invites a gasp. Church does lots of panoramic New England and Catskills scenes, but he’s famous, and famous as a painter showman, for The Heart of the Andes, The Icebergs, from 1861, Aurora Borealis, from 1865, and El Khasné, Petra, from 1874.

He’s less famous for Olana, his home and estate, but together they’re spectacles as much as any of his paintings. Church bought a 126-acre dilapidated farm on a hillside in 1860, later buying the hilltop and more of the surrounding land, and in the early 1870s built a majestic Orientalist villa. He fashioned his now-250 acres into a Picturesque-style park with sweeping mountain and valley views and a network of paths and carriage roads choreographed to highlight the big views as well as his gardens and orchards.

Cole did an abbreviated Grand Tour in 1842 and painted some Italian scenes, mostly in Sicily, but Church was intrepid. In 1868, he and his wife made a long tour through the Near East, visiting Beirut, Jerusalem, and Damascus and dozens of religious sites and ruins. They returned smitten by Orientalist design, which was already a hot Victorian look. No harems or snake charmers allowed. Remember, Church is from Connecticut. Very much allowed and indulged, though, are rich colors, especially orange, red, and gold, tiles, acres of stenciling, Persian carpets and patterned English carpets inspired by them, intricately inlaid furniture, and lots of metalwork. The house has all of the above. It’s certainly eclectic but never strident or even busy. It’s magical and a Persian carpet ride with no bumps.

The house is about 30 rooms and about 6,000 square feet of living space. Yes, 30 rooms sounds big, but Victorians had lots of little spaces like pantries, silver vaults, niches for fainting ladies, walk-in closets, and, of course, rooms for servants. The house is spacious, but it’s no palace. Church was, basically, his own architect, though he consulted with Calvert Vaux. The stone, brick, and ceramic-tile exterior has asymmetrical towers and porches, long, slender, painted columns, and curved and peaked arches. Church called the style “Persian, adapted to the Occident.” I’d call it Moorish-infused Queen Anne, but it’s High Victorian softened by the Aesthetic Movement. It’s not giddy. Church designed the ascent from the bottom of the hill to build anticipation, sprinkling views to clear the palette. The house stands at the top, impressive, even surprising but dignified, too, and even cerebral.

“You have arrived,” it says, but where? You have arrived through nature at a home inspired by all the natures of humanity, a place that unites and then transcends difference. “Welcome” in Arabic appears in the amber glass window above the transom.

The interior is comfortable. The Church family lived there most of the year, with patches of time in New York and Mexico during the winter. It’s obviously got the stamp of a strong personality, but it’s not dogmatic and not, like the Gamble House, which I reviewed a couple of weeks ago, a Gesamtkunstwerk, a total artwork. The polychrome motif continues and is satisfyingly rich. The house is superbly maintained. Patterns abound but so do windows and views. Rooms are human-scale. There’s no ballroom, for instance, and I wouldn’t call it grand. The rooms contain things that Church and his wife, Isabel, acquired throughout their lives. There are lots of paintings by Church but also work by Cole, Martin Johnson Heade, and other artist friends as well as family portraits. The Churches collected Mexican folk art, too. They had the taste of the time for curios such as Tiffany glass, stuffed birds of paradise, old boxes from India, and, of course, what they bought on their Near Eastern trip.

The house was meant to be lived in by a family with four children. Isabel and a tutor homeschooled them. The children’s lives are much in evidence in the house, especially by their massive egg collection. Church was an extraordinarily successful artist, both in critical reception and in the wealth he accrued. He was part of New York’s elite, a Victorian grandee who helped establish the Metropolitan Museum of Art and who belonged to the mainstay New York clubs. After, say, 1875, he retired as a marquee artist, focusing on Olana’s landscape and painting exquisite, small plein air paintings of the views. Many of these gems are at Olana. Unlike Church’s studio oils, which have a tight finish with the barest paint texture, these small things are deliciously textured.

The hallway leading to the stairs has a niche for an impressive, organized group of Near Eastern metalwork and textiles. A Moorish shield, spears, and helmets are arranged as visual centerpieces, but a small Buddha is tucked in as well as stenciled winged Egyptian deities. Two man-size ibis candlesticks make for a touch of Sunset Boulevard, but such moments are rare. Church’s famous painting of Petra, with its intricate Church-designed frame, has a specially made spot above a Moorish-style fireplace.

As historic-preservation stories go, Olana is a hit that was a near miss, and that would have been a disastrous one. Church died in 1900. Isabel had died the year before. The house stayed in the Church family. The last occupant was the widow of Louis, one of Church’s sons. She died with no children in 1964, age 96, leaving the house and land to her nephews and nieces.

This was not a good time for a pile like Olana to be untethered from its old-lady owner. Dozens of new movements had supplanted the Hudson River School as America’s mod aesthetic. I’m an American-art scholar, and this period is my specialty, so I’m naturally appalled by how far the art of this period had fallen, not quite to the realm of collectible Americana but not far from it. Church’s work was famous and iconic but, like the Sphinx, not front of mind. It wasn’t until the 1970s that 19th-century American landscapes and seascapes roared back in style, in the marketplace, in museums, and among academics.

The house was seen as an eyesore, the land and views — well, elite, big-city thinking was that upstate New York had plenty of these, and they all looked the same. The executor’s plan was to subdivide the land, disperse the contents of the house. The house likely would have been bulldozed by whoever bought the land on which it sat.

David Huntington, an assistant professor at Smith College, was the man who shouted “Fire!” He’d written his dissertation on Church at Yale. At the time, in the mid 1950s, he visited the house and Louis’s widow, Sally Church. He was astonished to see that the house was virtually unchanged from Frederic and Isabel’s day. A receipt for every object they acquired filled neatly kept cabinets.

The attic was packed. Old clothes, old toys, old Victorian everything reposed in boxes or piles, arranged with care, as did hundreds of Church drawings, 700 paintings, thousands of photographs, every letter the Churches got, and family journals.

Huntington begged the executor to let him make an inventory. He then persuaded him to give him three months to raise $470,000 to buy Olana for a not-for-profit trust. It seemed quixotic at best, evidence of delirium most likely.

Those were the days. Things could move fast. Bureaucrats thick as weeds hadn’t yet flourished. Huntington proved to be an adept salesman and marketing genius. He was connected, too. He went to Yale and Princeton and taught at Smith. Huntington, in weeks, organized a small Church exhibition. He mobilized Hudson Valley aristocrats and scoured the Rolodexes of the brave few who’d unsuccessfully tried to stop the demolition of Penn Station. Among those little cards read “Kennedy, Jackie.” Mrs. Kennedy, passionate about historic preservation, got involved. The May 13, 1966, issue of Life magazine ran a 14-page spread titled “Must This Mansion Be Destroyed?” Yes, those were the days. Mass media had class.

Sally Church’s executor, her nephew, though he extended the deadline, was business-minded. With the deadline approaching, the drive was still more than $150,000 short. He’d arranged for the contents of the house to be packed, ready for shipping to auction houses, flea markets, and the local dump. Huntington’s fundraising co-chairman, Sam Aldrich, approached Laurance Rockefeller, his cousin, who at the time was immersed in the preservation of Billings Farm in Woodstock, Vt. It’s a 1,000-acre house and farm, a pioneer in cattle-breeding, and a time capsule of Vermontiana. Rockefeller made a small gift. At the same time, state legislators from Columbia County, where Olana sits, and neighboring Dutchess and Greene Counties introduced an amendment to a bill in the New York legislature appropriating the funds needed. At the time, spending government money for historic preservation just wasn’t done. Too many boondoggles got in the way. It passed on the last day of the 1966 session.

Laurance’s brother, Nelson, was the governor of New York. He’d notoriously just led the charge in demolishing nearly 200 acres of downtown Albany for the Empire State Plaza. Atoning for his sin, he stood beneath Olana’s arched front door and signed the bill saving the estate from ruin.

Welcome, Olana, back from the dead.

I visited Olana in part to see the very good exhibition Cross Pollination: Heade, Cole, Church, and Our Contemporary Moment, done by Olana with the Cole Historic Site and Crystal Bridges. I’ll write about it more next week. I was curious about its visitor center, which is a few years old now but new to me. Visitor centers serving historic sites are almost always overbearing, obnoxious, overweight carbuncles. This one was discreet and attractive.

Sean Sawyer is the president of the not-for-profit that operates Olana, the Olana Partnership. He’s been there for six years. I know him from his time running the Royal Oak Society. He’s got a positive, realistic vision for restoring Church’s landscape, which rivals in beauty and complexity the best work of Frederick Law Olmsted. William Coleman is the chief curator and is part of the Olana Partnership. He started two years ago, coming from the Newark Museum, where he was the American art curator. He is the best young American art curator I know and among the most knowledgeable and creative curators of his generation. They’re a good team. Olana is only partly funded by the State of New York. It has a dynamic volunteer base that raises money for special projects such as the renovation of the grounds.

Next week: Olana as an early-American masterpiece of landscape architecture