Roundtable

Rediscovering Olana: Frederic Church’s Gesamtkunstwerk

Thursday, November 9
6:30 PM

Frederic Church (1826-1900) was America’s first international art star, whose “great paintings” of the 1850s and 1860s achieved international acclaim and the highest prices of the period. However, he was also a man of wide-ranging interests, who twice climbed the Andes and engaged with a circle of artistic friends including Frederick Law Olmsted and Mark Twain. Church was a founding trustee of New York’s Metropolitan Museum and an early Commissioner of Central Park.   
    It was in Church’s creation of Olana, his home and studio outside Hudson, NY, however, that he reached the apogee of his artistic achievement, creating over 40 years from 1860 to 1900 an integrated work of art, architecture, and landscape, a Gesamtkunstwerk of the American landscape.    
   Sean E. Sawyer, Ph.D., Washburn & Susan Oberwager President of The Olana Partnership, will explore Church’s creation of Olana, its rescue from oblivion 50 years ago, and its subsequent restoration by The Olana Partnership and the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation, and Historic Preservation.

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