In 1860, the renowned landscape painter Frederic Church purchased a mountainous tract of riverfront property, situated between the towns of Hudson and Catskill in New York’s Hudson Valley. With his wife, Church dedicated the rest of his life to carving out a haven on the Hudson, called Olana. The artist’s Persian-inspired villa, perched on the property’s highest point and visible from miles away, is certainly eye-catching. However, Church’s artistic philosophy is most evident in his careful orchestration of the surrounding 250 acres, which he conceived as a total work of art. "I can make more and better landscapes in this way than by tampering with canvas and paint in the studio,” he wrote of Olana in 1864. His interventions—planting thousands of trees, engineering a lake, and crafting views and vistas through subtle landscaping—transformed the property into a series of living compositions.
