GLORIES OF OLANA: THE VIEWS OF THE HUDSON
Debby Mayer
ccSCOOP News
05-29-09 - Olana used to be an experience at once spontaneous and contemplative. We leashed up the dog, pried the visiting New Yorker away from the Times, and drove up the winding road through the woods to the astonishing house and, just around its corner, the extraordinary view. For Olana was all about the view. The house was unique but open only at Christmas, a holiday treat. The rest of the year we peered into the windows, telling ourselves about Frederic Church, the Hudson River School painter who created it. We walked there, we skied there, but mostly we turned away from the house, and—awed, silenced—we took in the long view, south on the Hudson River, as Church had done 100 years before us.
|
|
|
|
These days, Olana is a museum experience, the historic home of Frederic Church (1826–1900). There’s a kiosk on the winding road, where visitors are sometimes charged an entry fee (and sometimes not). The coach house has become a chock-full gift shop, where at the counter you buy your ticket to tour the main house.
And Olana is now home to the Evelyn and Maurice Sharp Gallery, which opened on Memorial Day Weekend with its first exhibition, Glories of the Hudson: Frederic Edwin Church’s Views from Olana. Entry to the gallery requires a separate tour, called “Backstairs and Glories of the Hudson.”
Led by a guide, five of us entered the back of the mansion via the servants’ door and made our way up two narrow flights of stairs, Victorian in their length and depth, plus another flight, as we learned what little is known about the Church’s servants and how the house was run. It’s an interesting tangent, and it doesn’t keep a visitor from the gallery for long.
The gallery, a guest bedroom in Church’s day, is named in honor of the parents of Richard T. Sharp, a trustee of the Olana Partnership. The exhibition is small, which is to say do-able—some thirteen paintings, sketches, and drawings on the walls and a few more in a case. Most are by Church, with others by Arthur Parton, Lockwood de Forest, and Charles de Wolf Brownell. On a lush late spring day I found the winter scenes most riveting, including Church’s Winter Sunset from Olana (c. 1871–72).
But the artworks had stiff competition from the fireplace tiles, painted in a delectable Moorish motif. And everything in the room paled to the view outside the one window. The window is screened, so that sunlight won’t harm the art, and the view is almost the same as the one to be had below, for free. But we were two stories up, and there below lay both the river and the built pond meant to echo the bend in the river: timeless, eternal, indifferent to the house and the tickets and the gift shop and even the thoughtful, detailed renderings of the countryside in every season.
I could have looked out that window all day.
|
|
Frederic Edwin Church, Winter Sunset from Olana |
www.olana.org
|
