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"The wide variety of selections from Frederic Edwin Church’s collection of his own paintings shows the master in all phases of his career, in sketches and finished paintings, depicting the breadth of his subjects and the high technical skills that established him as an eminent and influential artist in his own time. As works he held on to or reacquired and kept in his house during his lifetime, they embody the heart of his artistic vision and convey a deeply personal slant. As pictures he hung and lived with at Olana, they tell the larger story of that extraordinary place and are as illuminating when seen in context as on their own."—from the Introduction

Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900) traveled the world, captured its beauty in countless paintings, and brought it home to live at Olana, his castle on the Hudson. The name was inspired by a reference Church found to a fortress or a treasury-storehouse in ancient Persia. This extraordinary selection of Church’s paintings from his collection at Olana puts the most cherished of his treasures on full display in a volume that includes eighty color plates.

Church’s paintings, among the most acclaimed examples of art of the Hudson River School, are found in museums and private collections around the globe. However, Church kept some of his art close by during his lifetime. The rich collection that remains at Olana includes about seven hundred pieces, including notebooks, drawings, and oils, both sketches and completed canvases. They cover the full range of Church’s career chronologically and thematically. The highlights from his personal collection are found in the touring exhibition that accompanies this book.

The introduction by John Wilmerding and a substantial essay by Kevin J. Avery place the work into the context of Church’s life and travels and examine Church’s influences and the public reception of his art. Throughout Treasures from Olana, they discuss how profoundly Church’s hilltop home and the surrounding landscape inspired and informed his work. His paintings, in turn, illuminate Olana more than a century after his death.

The Olana Partnership, Hudson, N.Y., and New York State’s Office of Parks, Recreation, and Historic Preservation, Albany, N.Y., organized Treasures from Olana: Landscapes by Frederic Edwin Church. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Church is a genius
Church is a true artistic genius.Olana is the name of his home on the Hudson.It is now a museum, and I strongly recommend you visit it.This a great book of Church's paintings.It captures the primeval America, the world before the great forests were cut down.You should also check out my Listmania list at the bottom of this page for more excellent books on landscape painting.

treasure of a book
I love it! If you love Fredric Church this book is a must have. Besides his countless breath taking paintings, it also invites you into his world
and the place he loved the most. It's a treasure of a book. ... Read more

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In 1865 the American landscape painter Frederic Edwin Church and his wife, Isabel, traveled to Jamaica on a sojourn of recovery after the tragic deaths of their two young children Herbert and Emma. A time to mourn and escape from the constant reminders found at their home, Olana, the Churches' trip to Jamaica also provided ample inspiration for Frederic. The Olana Collection includes eight oil sketches, an ink drawing, and a pencil drawing Church made in Jamaica. Five of these oil sketches on paper Church chose to mount to canvas and frame for his and Isabel's enjoyment; over the years they have hung in different rooms at Olana. From these works, and others held by the Cooper-Hewitt, Church created two major studio oils, The Vale of St. Thomas, Jamaica, 1867 (the Wadsworth Atheneum) and The After Glow, 1867 (the Olana Collection).

Within Church's oeuvre the studies of Jamaican sunsets, mountains, and foliage are particularly lovely. Church wrote of Jamaica: 'The scenery is superb. . . . I have accomplished a great amount of work-but there is so much to do that I am at a loss to decide day by day-what to paint.'

The 2010 exhibit at Olana will help explain Church's working process by showing Sunset Jamaica and the resulting studio work The After Glow together; it will include five works never before exhibited and reveal Church's interesting use of his photography collection both as an aide-memoire and as substrate for sketching. Fern Hunting among Picturesque Mountains includes forty-eight color illustrations, as well as essays by Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser (on Church's Jamaica work) and Katherine Manthorne (about Church's friends and fellow artists who also traveled to Jamaica to paint). ... Read more

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Published to accompany a major exhibition of notable landscapes and seascapes by Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900), this catalogue offers a rich sampling of the artist's five decades of creative production.Reproduced here in full color, the works constitute a veritable travelogue of the places Church visited over the course of his illustrious career, including much of New York State and New England, Labrador, Central and South America, Greece, Turkey, and the Holy Land. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

good but not great
A decent book with a fair number of good quality reproductions.However, a lot of them are small (half page or less and the book itself is not big)and Church's work needs to be seen big. The selection is also not great since quite a few of his most notable pieces are missing. I probably would have passed on this if I had flipped through it in a book store verses buying online.

landscapist
a wonderful book filled with enough images to blow your mind! lol on a serious note- this book has an amazing collection of Church's paintings, all of which are sure to make a lasting impression on you about the romantic landscape. Great reproductions and a very informative read.

The Splendid Visions Of Frederic Church
Fredrick Edwin Church is generally acknowledged as being the greatest American landscape painter of the 19th century. I believe he is one of the best painters, period, to have taken on the task of revealing and capturing, in oil on canvas, the magnificent pageantry of the natural world-- skies, mountains, forests, waters, even icebergs. His ability to render intricate botanical and geological detail combined with luminous atmospheric effects, is unsurpassed.

In recent times, we have been fortunate to have had at least 3 significant books devoted to his work, the 1989 Fredrick Edwin Church, published in conjunction with the major show of his work at the National Gallery, 2005's Fredrick Church, by John Howat, and now Fredrick Edwin Church, Romantic Landscapes and Seascapes, the subject of this review.

This book is essentially the catalogue of 37 paintings that comprised a recent 2 city exhibition, and it presents them in great detail. The main limitation of this book and the exhibit it documents, is that unlike the National Galley show, we have only a few of Church's major works included. Well over half the paintings are studies or minor paintings. There are, however, significant paintings that we can now more fully appreciate, like The Aegean Sea, that was previously only available as a tiny thumbnail, and others I have never seen before in any form.A number of his lesser known later works, that focused on the old world, as opposed to his more popular new world vistas, are also included here. Had the book contained only these works, it would be a nice addition for a serious collector of Church, but the second section greatly widens its range and appeal to the general collector.

While the later portion duplicatesthe paintings of the first section, to an excessive degree, it also includes many of the major works not included in the exhibit, showing the studies and the finished works that grew from them, side by side. In addition to this, the quality of color reproductions is suburb; they are bright, clear, saturated and subtle. No single reproduction can successfully reproduce the elaborate compositions of Church; sometimes the shadow areas are too dark, sometimes the bright colors washed outor made garish, etc, but this book does an outstanding job.

It may not be the best single book on Church, due the limitations I mentioned, but for anyone who loves his work, it is a very welcome addition. For the serious collector of his work, this is a must.

Breath -Taking
Carr, in this stunning volume, has collected the best of Church, a painter with extraordinary talent, considered a neo-classist artist, (Romantic) who has not been recognized for his pure genius.

Neo Classicism spawned in Europe and in the United States sometime during the late 18 and 19th centuries, and continues to be practiced in present time. During this period, the artist began to emulate those artists of 'Realism', harkening back to the Renaissance and the ancient Greeks.

While Expressionism and Impressionism began to predominate the art world at the end of the 18th century and well into the next, neo-classicism remains and, in most 'artistic circles' has been ridiculed for returning to an old form rather than moving forward.

Needless to say, however, the neo-classicist artist is well educated and quite familiar with the Canon; well versed... these artists have produced stunning work, and at the same time, can splash water colours across a white canvas and call it "art", i.e, Sidney Pollack, Andy Warhol's screens, etc. Original, perhaps, an advancement in Art?...but to my mind, haphazardly splashing paint on a canvas or screening photo's like Warhol's famous Marlyn Monroe with the swiftness of an assembly line, (Earning absurd amounts of money) makes me wonder if it really is 'Art'?

One of my favourite 'modern' artists is the Austrian, Gustave Klimt. Klimt began as a portrait painter, painting the rich, royalty, famous and infamous, to then branch off and start a new movement which eventually led to German Expressionism.

When one views his work, we can see he is informed of arts foundations, educated in Classicism. In fact he has created some of the most stunning paintings during and after the First World War.

The American, Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900) was predominantly a Landscape artist. Church is regarded as a neo-classicist because of his aversion to all things 'modern'. But when viewing his many works can see that his innovation, during this time, was his use of colour, that seems and does draw you into his paintings..bright, visceral, at times breath-taking.

In no uncertain terms, Church has joined the fray of my list of the GREAT Romantics...as is the foundational tenet of the Romantic View: the never-ending search for the Ideal in art.

If so inclined, google Fredric Edwin Church - and you'll be astonished...

A wonderful text...indeed.
... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

An Early Look
Written in 1965 and published the following year, this book was at the time an early study ofthe major works by Church, one of the leading artists of the famous Hudson School.It gives a comprehensive look and analysis of the painter and his work, providing good examples of the results of his travels in Europe, the Middle East, the North and the Tropics.It also allows the reader an interesting glimpse inside Olana, the famed residence of Church.
As a publication of the mid 60s, the book has a very limited number of color reproductions of Church's work (7 paintings and 1 inside Olana).The rest are in black and white, including good examples of his drawings.
... Read more

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This is the largest project thus far undertaken on Frederic Edwin Church:a comprehensive scholarly catalogue of his works of art still at Olana State Historical Site, his former home in upstate New York. Divided into sixteen chronological sections, it covers 736 drawings, paintings, and prints, spanning nearly sixty years of his life.The items, each of them illustrated in the catalogue, range from doodles in his schoolboy textbooks and exercise books, to student works done under Thomas Cole, to important studio paintings exhibited during Church's lifetime, and pencil sketches and finished paintings executed in Mexico as late as two years before his death in April 1900. The holdings are most concentrated at the beginning of Church's career, between 1844 and 1850, and toward the end, between 1880 and 1898, but all phases of his travels and his art are represented, including preparations for his major studio paintings. ... Read more

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The latest book from a renowned Church expert. ... Read more

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Landscape paintings are as diverse as the landscapes painters live in. Northern Europe gave rise to both the wide, atmospheric spaces of Brueghel's morality tales and to the moody, dramatic depictions of nature found in Jacob Ruisdael's canvases. The 18th century produced idyllic landscapes like Lorrain's that were heavily influenced by courtly ideals, as well as heroic typographies from the New World by Heade and Church. Constable's and Courbet's scenes revealed a conscious, realistic return to nature, while Monet painted her in all her light-infused, impressionistic glory. Thick swirls of emotional isolation and individualism wind around the fields and night skies of Van Gogh's canvases while colorful patterns delineate the Tahitian waters and beaches where Gauguin searched for purity. Outstanding works by Watteau, Canaletto, Picasso, Nolde, and Kirchner cover even more ground. More than 500 years of landscape paintings create the territories that wind their way through this lushly illustrated book, reflecting changes in the way landscapes have been depicted but also understood, as places we not only live in and colonize but also dream about, abandon, transform, and return to--and as places that exist without us as well.Baron Hans Heinrich of Thyssen-Bornemisza has always been passionate about collecting landscape paintings. These extraordinary works from the Thyssen and Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection appear here for the first time in one volume.Five hundred years of landscapes as seen through the eyes of Wassily Kandinsky, Vincent van Gogh, Frederick Edwin Church, Pablo Picasso, Claude Lorrain, John Constable, Pieter Brueghel, and many others.
Essays by Wenzel Jacob, Thomas Llorens, Simon Schama. Artists include:Pieter Brueghel, Frederic Edwin Church, John Constable, Wassily Kandinsky, Claude Lorrain, Claude Monet, Jacob Ruisdael, Vincent van Gogh.

9.75 x 11 in.
100 color, 20 b/w illustrations ... Read more

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"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. The exhibition and its accompanying publication Glories of the Hudson: Frederic Edwin Church's Views from Olana mark 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 his home, Olana-in 1845, on a sketching expedition suggested by his teacher Thomas Cole. Returning to the Hudson 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, and 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 brushstrokes or autumn colors and clear winter light in more finished easel paintings. The best of these are reproduced here, in eighty-three illustrations, sixty-nine in full color, some of them published for the first time. The essay by Evelyn D. Trebilcock and Valerie A. Balint, the introduction by Kenneth John Myers, and the foreword by John K. Howat together provide an absorbing narrative of the development of the Hudson River School and its most successful artist.

The Olana Partnership, Hudson, New York, and New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation, Albany, New York, organized Glories of the Hudson:Frederic Edwin Church's Views from Olana, held from May 23 to October 12, 2009. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

If you drive up the Hudson Valley and don't visit Olana after reading this book you have wasted your time and gasoline. DD
Frederic Church's great paintings are by and large in the major American museums but his villa, Olana, which is in the Hudson Valley, is an artistic achievement which the artist put just as much love and care into as any of his paintings. This book explains howhe did it. ... Read more