The Hudson Valley by David Levine

Author:David Levine
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Globe Pequot
Published: 2019-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Upper Valley

Nature also wins at the final destination on this tour. Its owner and builder, Frederic Edwin Church, was perhaps the premier artist of the Hudson River School of nineteenth-century landscape painting. And many of his paintings were composed right here from his hilltop estate.

He called it Olana, meaning “treasure house” in ancient Persian, and designed every last detail—down to mixing the paint colors himself—in Persian-Moorish style. He also meticulously oversaw the landscaping on his 250-acre spread to frame and highlight the views of the river and mountains. “I can make more and better landscapes in this way,” he wrote, “than by tampering with canvas and paint in the studio.”

This spring my wife and I made the trek up the hill for our second visit and our daughter’s first. We took the child-friendly but shorter family tour, which points out all the stuff Church collected over thirty years of world travel, including furniture, tapestries, rugs, bronzes, paintings, sculptures, and even sombreros. Coolest of all is looking out the wide, Middle Eastern–style windows and seeing the very vistas he painted. Following a long walk over the roads he himself cut, through the woods, and then along a ridge overlooking the river, we had a small sense of what it must have been like, 150 years ago, to live like the rich and famous in New York’s stunning Hudson Valley.

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