The home and studio at Olana represent an eclectic Victorian take on Islamic or Persian art and architecture. Olana’s front door with Islamic-inspired decoration by Church, via Flickr Although the Churches were devout Christians, they felt no hesitation to base their house on Islamic precedents. Both deeply religious people, Frederic and Isabel Church have been seeking to bring a little bit of Jerusalem home with them. They had visited Jerusalem, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and Egypt. This elaborate home, whose name refers to an ancient Persian castle, was inspired by their recent trip to the Holy Land. It wasn’t until the late 1860s, after the Churches had weathered the Civil War, traveled Europe and the Middle East, and lost two young children, that they created Olana. The Churches initially inhabited a modest cottage on the property, designed by Beaux-Arts architect Richard Morris Hunt. The property would later amount to 250 acres, including the steep hill on which the home was eventually sited. It’s likely that he chose it for its grand views from the very beginning. This is a part of the Wikipedia article used under the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA).Frederic Edwin Church Creates Olana Olana’s rear exterior façade, via New York Best Experience websiteįrederic Edwin Church bought 125 acres in Hudson, New York, not far from the former home of his mentor, Thomas Cole, shortly before his marriage to his wife, Isabel. The presence of the cross suggests the peaceful coexistence of religion with the landscape. Following this theme, the painting displays the landscape in detail at all scales, from the intricate foliage, birds, and butterflies in the foreground to the all-encompassing portrayal of the natural environments studied by Church. Ruskin emphasized the scrutiny of nature, and he viewed art, morality, and the natural world as spiritually unified. Ruskin's Modern Painters was a five-volume treatise on art that was, according to American artist Worthington Whittredge, "in every landscape painter's hand" by mid-century. The theory of British critic John Ruskin was also an important influence on Church. The luminism painting style is an aspect of the Hudson River School of landscape painting, of which Frederic Edwin Church was a part, and is associated with American landscapes in the 19th century. Characteristics of luminism are: a diffuse light, a hazy atmosphere, and a calm view of the land. These works are also built around the tones of "ochre, brown, gray going to blue or green, and green" at the expense of the full value of color.Ĭhurch's landscape conformed to the aesthetic principles of the picturesque, as propounded by the British theorist William Gilpin, which began with a careful observation of nature that was then enhanced by particular notions about composition and harmony.Īurora Borealis and some of Church's other landscape works, such as Morning in the Tropics (1877), are examples of Church's use of luminism. Presenting the ship's safe passage through the eerie experience, Church suggested optimism for the future with a tiny light shining out from the ship's window.Ĭharles Millard describes Church's paintings as "large in scale and size, sharply horizontal in format" and ".dramatic in subject, but yielding in execution, and tend to exploit both value contrast and continuous tonal transition." Church's works, including Aurora Borealis, were completed using small touches of pigment built together through thin applications, leaving the viewer unaware of fracture between strokes. Contrasting with his earlier works The North and The Icebergs (1861), the intact ship highlights Hayes' achievements in navigating this space, as well as the state of the nation in navigating this contentious historical moment. Aurora Borealis incorporated details of Hayes' ship, drawn from a sketch he brought back upon returning from his expedition. The peak in the painting had been named Mount Church during Hayes's expedition. The iconography of the painting suggested personal and nationalistic references. Coinciding with Hayes' furthest northern movement into what he named Cape Leiber, the aurora borealis appeared over the peak. Hayes provided a sketch and description of the aurora borealis display he witnessed one January evening. The first incident was an aurora witnessed by Church's pupil, the Arctic explorer Isaac I. (142.3 × 212.2 cm) and is now owned by the Smithsonian American Art Museum.Īurora Borealis is based on two separate sketches. Aurora Borealis is an 1865 painting by Frederic Edwin Church of the aurora borealis and the Arctic expedition of Dr.
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