Exhibitions

Fern Hunting Among These Picturesque Mountains: Frederic Edwin Church in Jamaica
Evelyn & Maurice Sharp Gallery
Open Thursday-Sunday 11AM-4PM


In 1865, Frederic Church, an avid traveler with a special passion for the tropics, journeyed to Jamaica. This was unlike his previous expeditions, as he and his wife, Isabel, were escaping from intense personal grief: the loss of their two young children. Throwing himself into the exploration and documentation of the island, the renowned artist produced a variety of works ranging from delicate pen sketches of palm trees to oil sketches of the atmospheric Blue Mountains and brilliant sunsets. The importance of the trip is reflected in the number of studies Church chose to mount, frame, and display at Olana, which became a major attraction for visitors to his home. The best of the related sketches and paintings from Jamaica comprise the exhibit. Exhibit open June-October call (518) 828-0135 for information.

In the Footsteps of Frederic Church: Photos by Larry Lederman
Olana Coachman's House
Open daily, except Monday, from 10AM-5PM
The exhibition is free
Larry Lederman is a photographer and writer who has traveled to many of the locations Frederic Church visited. This exhibition displays photographs of a number of sites that Frederic Church painted and seek to evoke his artistic vision and explore his art. The photographs affirm that many of the wilderness enclaves Church painted still exist, preserved as part of our heritage because of the beauty that he and other nineteenth century painters captured. Autographed copies of the photos will be available for sale in the Olana museum store, and are also available  online.

PAST EXHIBITIONS

Glories of the Hudson: Frederic Edwin Church's Views From Olana
May 23 – October 12, 2009

The site is the result of a careful study of the river-banks, and commands so many views of varied beauty, that all the glories of the Hudson may be said to circle it.
– H. W. French, Art and Artists in Connecticut, 1879

In 1609, Henry Hudson sailed up the river that now bears his name. This exhibition marked the Quadricentennial of his discovery by highlighting Frederic Church’s sketches of the prospect from his hilltop home overlooking the river.

Church made his first sketch of the Hudson River and Catskill Mountains from Red Hill – the south end of the property that became Olana – in 1845, on a sketching expedition suggested by his teacher Thomas Cole. Returning to the Valley in 1860 as the nation’s most famous and best-paid artist, Church settled on a farm on the lower slope of the Sienghenbergh, securing for himself and his new wife a splendid vantage point for studying, sketching, and painting the river. Church continued to add land to his property, attaining new and varied vistas of the river. He crowned the estate with a Persian inspired house designed to frame splendid views of the Hudson River and Catskill Mountains.

Church never tired of his views of the river, documenting his passion for the Hudson in paintings, oil sketches, and drawings. From Olana, he observed the transformations wrought by the changing seasons, weather, and light, capturing chilly winter snows, brilliant sunsets, and passing storms in sketches executed with a few brush strokes or autumn colors and clear winter light in more finished easel paintings. Often Church was so pleased with the results that he mounted and framed sketches for display in his home. At other times they remained as personal references in the many portfolios of sketches the artist kept for his own private viewing and remembrance.

This inaugural exhibition of the Evelyn & Maurice Sharp Gallery featured a full-color, hardcover catalogue published by Cornell University Press and The Olana Partnership, with an essay by curator Evelyn Trebilcock and associate curator Valerie Balint, an introduction by Kenneth John Myers, Curator of American Art at the Detroit Institute of Arts, and a forward by John K. Howat, Church scholar and former Lawrence A. Fleischman Chairman of the Departments of American Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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Treasures From Olana: Landscapes by Frederic Edwin Church
 
Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900) was probably the most renowned American artist of the Civil War era. Trained by Thomas Cole, the founder of the Hudson River School of landscape painters, and stimulated by the writings of the famed explorer and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, Church early demonstrated immense talent and global curiosity. He traveled extensively, and in his New York City studio painted monumental pictures of subjects in North and South America, the sub-Arctic, Europe, and the Near East. From the late 1850s to the 1870s, he displayed his most ambitious canvases as quasi-theatrical events, drawing thousands of people in America and Great Britain to his exhibitions, and marketing many of his works in fine engravings and lithographs.

Church amassed wealth sufficient to design and build a large estate, called Olana, in upstate New York for himself and his family, and his prominence was such that in 1870 he was both elected a founding trustee of The Metropolitan Museum of Art and appointed to the Board of the New York City Parks Commission. Though his reputation subsequently faded, Church and his art enjoyed an enthusiastic revival in the second half of the twentieth century. His works now enhance the collections of museums throughout the United States and in Europe, and have been the subject of many exhibitions.

As striking in their way as any of Church's major paintings are his small oil studies and sketches, many executed wholly or partly in the field and several in the studio as designs for the major works. During his residence at Olana, Church framed many of those pictures, including a few large paintings, expressly for presentation in his home, and over a hundred others remain preserved there. Treasures from Olana represents a small selection of the finest of Church's sketches and studies from the house—most of them he is known to have displayed on its walls—as well as Olana's most important large painting, El Khasné, Petra. In 1875 he made El Khasné a gift to his wife, Isabel, and installed it over the fireplace in the Sitting Room.