Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.From across the Hudson River, you can see the turrets of Olana jutting from the woods at the apex of a hill. Nineteenth-century landscape artist Frederic Edwin Church designed his extraordinary home — and the surrounding 250 acres — as the pinnacle of his vision of America and of his art.“Olana is the monument of Emerson’s, Thoreau’s and Whitman’s America,” wrote the art historian David Huntington; an architectural version of their transcendentalist odes to nature and spiritualism. But when Church bought the first parcel of the property in 1860, the land had been almost entirely cleared due to rapid industrialisation. He replanted it with thousands of native trees to create picturesque approaches and viewpoints where he could paint en plein air and create his fantasies of nature. He had apprenticed with Thomas Cole, whose modest home remains across the river from Olana. They and their peers shaped the Hudson River School, an initially disparaging term for their Romantic, American pastoral style. Church achieved early success through his idealised, composite landscapes such as “Heart of the Andes” (1859), which emphasised dramatic rather than accurate scenery.The wooded paths and cleverly placed benches invite contemplative rambling around the lake and working farmChurch laboured over his physical views as much as his painted ones, writing, “I am busy landscape architecturing!” The views of four states (on a clear day) and surrounding mountain ranges are magnificent even through a light summer rain, and especially when flushed red and gold in autumn. The wooded paths and cleverly placed benches invite contemplative rambling around the lake and working farm, but the 5 miles of carriage roads all lead to Olana.With red-and-white striped awnings, the home is a Victorian-Orientalist pile reminiscent of its London contemporary Leighton House, albeit with painted patterns largely replacing the latter’s intricate tiles. Church designed stencils to create polychrome friezes on the building’s interior and exterior cornices in styles translated from Islamic tilework and carving. Church and his wife Isabel became enamoured of Islamic architecture during their extensive travels in the Middle East, their interpretations of the region influencing Olana’s design and Persian-inspired name. In the sitting room, Church’s renowned 1874 painting of Al-Khazneh in Petra, Jordan (“El Khasné, Petra”), hangs over a complementary pink arched fireplace, while the stairwell window streams gold light into the hall through an intricate cut-paper imitation of a mashrabiyya.The artist planned the house around its views, with windows forming elaborate frames through decorative amber glass and a porch overlooking a dramatic bend in the Hudson. The enfiladed rooms offer a magpie-like compilation of Church’s interests and aesthetics, packed with heavy Victorian furniture, densely patterned carpets, artworks from Europe, Mexico and India mixed with his own. However, only about 20 per cent of the state park’s 200,000 annual visitors book a tour of the house, seemingly more drawn to the natural and Church-created landscapes than his interiors. A new visitor centre is under construction, which Sean Sawyer, president of the non-profit Olana Partnership, hopes will provide an improved starting point for visitors to learn how Church’s “landscape art was integrated into the way in which he and his family lived”. Church’s painted testaments to the births of his first son and daughter, “Sunrise” and “Moonrise”, hang in the sitting room. Both died of diphtheria in 1865 — the boy aged two, the girl just five months — turning the small, hopeful pieces into wrenching elegies. The couple had four further children. Their youngest son Louis was instrumental in Olana’s preservation, enabling subsequent generations to explore how the landscape remains intertwined with human experience and solace.olana.orgFind out about our latest stories first — follow @ft_houseandhome on Instagram
