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"The recollection of the
blue mountains is as fresh and vivid to me as the
day I last saw them," wrote twenty-year-old Frederic
Church to Thomas Cole, his former art teacher, about
the Catskill Mountains. Fourteen years later this
memory brought the artist back to build a home for
his family. By then internationally lionized, Church
had traveled the Americas seeking panoramic landscapes
to paint. On large-scale canvases he depicted the
variety and splendor of the Americas: the frigid iridescence
of icebergs, the ceaseless turbulence of Niagara,
and the boiling fury of South American volcanoes.
Church created the images that fixed the features
of the American continents for a generation of pioneers
and entrepreneurs. This modest seventh-generation
New Englander became a sought-after but reluctant
celebrity.
Throughout the 1880s he
continued to elaborate upon the naturalistic landscape
at Olana. Myriad scenes were composed contrasting
open pastoral views, dark mysterious woodlands, and
passive water reflecting the landscape with the majestic
Hudson River and sublime distant mountains. The careful
placement of roads revealed these scenes to the viewer
in an orderly sequence of experiences, allowing the
landscape to be seen through Church's sensibilities.
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