Preserving a View: Landscape, Labor, and Industry at Frederic Church’s Olana

Taylor Rossini, WPAMC ’24

On our Northern Field Studies trip, we visited Olana, an Orientalist fantasia nestled along the Hudson River that served as the country home and studio of landscape painter Frederic Edwin Church. The property and its contents have remained remarkably intact from the Church family’s residence there, in large part due to the herculean efforts of art historian David Huntington beginning in the 1960s. While the house and its furnishings, which include a significant body of Church’s own work, are a no-brainer in terms of preservation, the house is only one facet of Church’s holistic vision for the property. Considered by Church scholar Franklin Kelly to be the artist’s “last great work,” embarked upon when severe arthritis forced him to eschew painting for other media, the Olana grounds constitute a remarkable achievement in landscape design and terraforming. The central area of the grounds to Church’s vision for the property have ensured their preservation, but a more complex preservation question arises in the form of the Olana viewshed—the carefully crafted sight lines that formed an integral part of Church’s vision, many of which include natural features and property beyond Olana’s jurisdiction. How can a view be preserved? 

The Olana viewshed currently holds landmark status. A historic marker erected by the nonprofit Scenic Hudson reads:

Olana Viewshed

This landscape made famous by Hudson River School painter Frederic E. Church 1826-1900.

Protected by the Scenic Hudson Land Trust

with funding from the Lila Acheson & Dewitt Wallace fund for the Hudson Highlands

The viewshed has achieved its landmark status not simply due to its natural beauty, but because of its integral relationship to Church’s artistic practice. The landscape provided a constant muse for the artist’s work in landscape painting, but, furthermore, played a crucial role in the immersive aesthetic experience offered by Olana. In the 1880s, physically unable to paint, Church shifted his medium of choice from canvas to the lands around him. Having built a career on immersive panoramas, Church now constructed in three-dimensions the views he had spent so long representing in two. He remarked in a letter to a friend, “I can make more and better landscapes in this way than by tampering with canvas and paint in the Studio.” 

Church composed his landscape as he would structure one of his paintings, creating a foreground, middleground, and background for each view. The creation of a pictorialized, naturalistic landscape involved huge physical intervention into the existing landscape, including the addition of working and non-working farms, winding roads, orchards, woodlands, and an artificial lake. In short, it took enormous effort and resources to make Olana’s natural landscape look like Church’s “nature.” The language used by curators and scholars to describe this effort emphasizes Church’s hand and agency in the process of pictorializing his grounds—he “composed” landscapes, both in paint and in life.  

Centering Church’s vision and even, rhetorically, his hand in the creation of the Olana landscape obscures the bodies that embarked upon this herculean effort of terraforming, which certainly did not include the elderly Church’s. As yet, there appears to have been little investigation into who performed this labor, but it is important to understand that the Olana grounds are not only a facet of Church’s artistic practice, but also a physical record of labor elided by a master narrative of eccentric genius. 

The ugly realities of labor in the landscape continue to dog the Church property. The Olana viewshed has on several occasions become a flashpoint for local debates about industrial development. In 2005, a proposal to build a cement plant on the east bank of the Hudson River was struck down by the state administration on grounds of, among other complaints, infringement upon scenic vistas. The plant, proposed by the Canadian company St. Lawrence Cement, would have included a 40-story smokestack and a two-mile-long conveyor system to move materials along the waterfront. New York Secretary of State Randy A. Daniels noted in his 20-page decision that the plant would mar, specifically, the sweeping views from Olana. Almost thirty years earlier, a Church painting in Olana’s collection, View of the Hudson River Valley in Winter from Olana, was even brought forward as evidence in court to recommend the denial of a construction license for a proposed nuclear power plant. Both debates speak to the enduring centrality of Church’s vision to local identity. 

The Olana viewshed remains today a sprawling, yet intangible piece of cultural heritage. The myriad of nonprofits, both cultural and environmental, that steward these historic sightlines find themselves up against the same trudge of industrial development that Church sought to eliminate from his landscapes, both painted and designed. Today, over a century after Church’s death, the Rip Van Winkle bridge, erected across the Hudson River in 1935 to connect the towns of Hudson and Catskill, represents one of the few industrial “intrusions” into his painstakingly constructed landscape, a testament to the viewshed’s enduring and incontrovertible status as a piece of North American cultural heritage.