The Colors of Olana

If you've never walked into an interior which caused your jaw to drop then you haven't witnessed the overwhelming effect a built environment can have. There are few of these places extant and even fewer here in the United States. I'm lucky to live just a few miles from one - the hilltop home of the Hudson River School painter Frederic Church, Olana. Perched on a mountaintop overlooking the Hudson River, it's sited facing southwest to take in the views of the Catskill Mountains to the west and the winding path of the river down towards NYC. Olana is a sight to behold. Church was the most famous painter in America in the late 19th century. His massive paintings of the natural world wooed critics and the masses alike. Olana was his masterpiece. 250 acres of woodlands, lakes and carriage roads with a house unlike any built before. It was wrested from his imagination after trips to the Middle East. Exotic doesn't even begin to describe it. Its architecture and interior colors are unique. You've never seen a home as colorful as this. It shouldn't work, yet it does. Until you get the opportunity to visit Olana listen in. It's the next best thing.

“Color is the foundation of great design. It can settle a building into its landscape. It can make an unattractive structural detail just disappear, and it can change your mood in a room instantly.

Welcome to Let's Talk Color. I'm Amy Krane, architectural color consultant at Amy Krane Color. I'm a color expert and use color to transform spaces and products from the ordinary to the sublime.

As a paint color specialist, realtor and design writer, I've got my finger on the pulse of what's happening in the world of color. In each episode, I'll reveal best practices for choosing color by introducing you to masters of color for the built world. So throw out those paint chips taped to your walls and let's get started.”

Today we'll be discussing a truly amazing place. It's called Olana, and it's a New York State historic site, as well as a National Historic Landmark. In fact, it's the most intact historic artist’s environment in the United States, and it's the home of the acclaimed Hudson River School painter Frederic Church. In the 1860s, Church bought land located in Columbia County, New York, above the Hudson River with his wife, Isabel. Work began on the property soon after and continued until almost 1900.

Olana encompasses 250 acres of bucolic landscapes shaped by Church and includes a lake, native woodlands and meadows, the historic house and its collections, the farm, an extensive carriage road system, and of course, far-reaching views. The view shed, virtually unchanged from when the house was built, except for a bridge, has been protected by those charged as stewards of Olana, successfully fighting off unsightly commercialization along the Hudson River nearby.

In the 19th century, Church became the most famous artist in the United States, best known for his adventurous travels and bold paintings of the natural world. He spent time in the Andes of South America and the Levant, or the Eastern Mediterranean, what we know as the Middle East now, amongst other places. Because we'll be talking about a place many listeners may not have seen yet, I'm going to suggest you access the podcast through the podcast's own website, let'stalkpaincolor.com, where you'll be able to see pictures of the interior of the house.

And also, of course, go to Olana's own website, Olana.org. And now I'd like to introduce the president of the Olana Partnership, Dr. Sean Sawyer. Sean has served as the Washburn and Susan Oberwager President of the Olana Partnership since May 2015. He received a BA summa cum laude in History and Archaeology from Princeton in 1988, and his PhD in Architectural History from Columbia University in 1999.

Prior to joining Olana, Sean was the executive director of the Royal Oak Foundation, the American Partner of the National Trust of England, Wales, and Northern Ireland. Sean is a member of the Columbia County Economic Development Corporation and of the Village of Kinderhook Historic Preservation Commission. Welcome, Sean.

Oh, thank you, Amy. Great to be here. Great to have you. I'm very impressed by your excellent summary of Olana. Great job.

Thank you for the resources available.

Can you talk about your own connection to Church and how you became involved with Olana leading to becoming its president?

Yes. You know, as you said, I've been here now coming around on a decade. And I was hired to lead the Olana partnership as we entered a really exciting period in our partnership with New York State Parks, which was about bringing back to the public all of Church's designs of Olana, the full 250 acres.

And we've just opened a new visitor center, the Frederic Church Center for Art and Landscape. So I hope that’s another incentive for some of your listeners to come and visit us if they haven't been here before. And so I was hired specifically for my background in working in historic site administration and I would say fundraising, nonprofit fundraising. So I was recruited to take the job. I was really excited to move up here from New York City.

And I beat the pandemic by a few years and take on this amazing project of working here at Olana with a great team, both in New York State Parks and in our own organization, the Olana Partnership.

Fantastic. Where does the name Olana come from, actually?

Well, you know we don't know absolutely for sure. Like most history, it's based on detective work. And the best evidence we have is that it comes from a place in Asia Minor.

So you know, basically modern-day Turkey over towards Syria. And that was described in an ancient Greek geography text by the author Strabo that was translated in 1855, and there's an English edition in Church's Library. The passage has a little pencil mark next to it that describes a place spelled O-L-A-N-E.

So instead of an A at the end, it has an E. The thought is that when the Churches embraced this name, they made it a little easier to pronounce in English. And that passage describes a treasure house set above a fertile river valley.

Wow.

So you know ,it fits. And that's our best sort of historical guess at the moment.

Wonderful. Did he build it to live there full time with his family? Did he do a lot of back and forth between New York City and Olana?

Always. He and the entire family traveled extensively their whole life. His artistic career was really based, he was really was a traveling artist and in many senses sort of an explorer artist. Certainly it relates to the style that he chose for the main house.

But like artists today who live in these hills around here in Hudson and the environment, it was tied directly to New York City being the main market for artists to create a career and develop a reputation to exhibit, to sell their work. And so he was back and forth all of the time. But Olana was the only home that he and his family ever had. They owned a small camp, a very modest camp up on Lake Millinocket in far northern Maine.

But this was the only property that he owned. And this is where they created, out of their own imagination and their travels and their memories of it, their home to raise their family. In the city, they rented, or they would, as the habit was back then, stay for months on time, or certainly at least, you know, six to eight weeks, let's say, with friends. And he had, they had many, many friends. They're incredibly social people.

But this was the base. This was home.

Okay. So they went all over with this young family growing up. Did they take tutors with them and you know end up on ships going all over?

 Yes. Yeah. I mean, you know, they were privileged people. You know, Church came from a fairly privileged background in Hartford, Connecticut, an old family of early colonial settlers.

And his wife as well was from a Connecticut family. Her father owned an import-export business that was connected through Paris to European markets. So, you know, they were, they were living a life of privilege and he added to that. I mean, he was the most successful American artist, the first American artist to exhibit and sell paintings in Europe without being an expatriate over there, right?

So he was really was what I would like to say, the first American international art star. And he knew how to promote himself. You know, that's a whole other topic. We did an exhibition, gosh, last winter, called Spectacle, Frederic Church in the Business of Art. And it was a real business enterprise for him. And so he was able to add significantly to his personal wealth. He inherited in the 1880s additional monies as his father and mother passed away.

So you know he had great disposable income to invest at Olana.

Amazing. Wow. You mentioned his wife. You said “they” a few times. So with he being the artist, was she involved at all with any of the aesthetic decisions that involved the house or the landscaping?

Well, now can you imagine somebody who you know you're in a marriage for as they were for 40 years that you're not going to be involved in some aspect.

I imagine even with your work, you hear multiple opinions from the same client based on which member of the family you speak to. But yes, seriously, we do know from writings and an oral history that was done with her daughter in particular later in her life. And the daughter whose name was also Isabel, so therefore she went by a nickname her whole life. She was known as Downey Church.

She said in that interview that particularly the interiors of the house at Olana were as much her mother’s as her father's. And there is one letter where Church writes to a friend who says, Isabel and I were up all night sorting through colors and stencils, right? So I think it was quite a collaborative process.

And you know as we get into talking more about the main house and its interiors, which are certainly the most stylistically distinct kind of aspect of Olana, you know they were very much inspired by the long journey they took about 18 months in total from 1867 to 1869 that was really centered on what was then called Ottoman Syria, or now a number of different countries, make that up.

But it was really the Near East, shall we say, the Levant, you used that term, which is a good phrase, but not very widely known these days. So that was the inspiration, really. Frederic was an artist, a visual artist, and a painter and a person of images. Isabel did most of the writing that we have left. And so she did a diary of their travels in the Near East.

And you can see her responding to these amazing places that they are going. And so when they return, although we do not have a lot of tangible evidence, you know we don't have a drawing that she signed or a letter that she said, I just designed the stencil for the arch over the stairway. We don't have that. We do assume that his hand was the one that ultimately was putting together the whole thing, but she was deeply consulted and involved with it.

I love that. I love that. Are any of those diaries or memoirs of hers available?

Well, they're in the research collection. We're working to digitize the collection. And those would be things that we would be able to get out there eventually. So you know hopefully you doing this podcast and others getting the word out will gain more visibility for Olana, and we can continue to do good work here to get those things out.

That's great. By the time Church bought the land and started to build, his mentor who lived across the river, Thomas Cole, had passed away.

I know he studied with him when he was as young as 18. So much is written about the landscapes that they loved and they painted across the river in what is now Greene County, where the Catskill Mountains are. But I haven't heard so much about whether they spent time here, East of the Hudson River around Olana? Do you think that they studied this landscape and painted it at all?

Absolutely.

I don't know if you know of the views from Burlington, Vermont, across Lake Champlain to the Adirondacks. The best views of the Adirondacks are from the other side. And so therefore, similarly, to get those great views of the Catskill escarpment, which was the great attraction for the early painters, the early 19th century- Cole and others, were over here from this bank of the river. And so that is, of course, the great sweeping views that so many thousands of people come every year to see from Olana.

And it is one of the most distinct, I think, views, certainly in the Eastern United States. It's a very, very important national landscape in that way, which is what our National Landmark designation really also is speaking to. So yes, and we do have specific drawings dated from his time with Cole. He was 18, 19 years old, 1844 to '46. Cole died two years later in 1848. He was quite young. He was a much mourned person.

And so we have a drawing dated May of 1845 when Church would have been 19 years old from the hill that is just by our new visitor center. And it shows that view. So we know he hiked these hills. They were privately held, a number of small land holdings, farms. And you know they were hiking hundreds of miles a week. It's insane. No wonder the poor man suffered greatly from arthritis at the end of his life.

You know, he was one of the first people to really explore all of Maine as an artist. Mount Desert Island, all of that was really not what it is today. You know, it was not a tourist destination. And the Green Mountains, the White Mountains, they were painting everywhere across New England. And then Church made his fame principally by becoming identified with South America. He hiked the Andes twice. You know So yeah, there wasn't a problem getting on a ferry and coming across and hiking up a 400-foot high hill.

Just amazing. It really is. You just mentioned that a lot of small parcels were owned by different landowners. Was it a trial and a tribulation to amass the parcels and put together the 250 acres?

Yes. The correspondence we have that survive which pertain to his acquiring the different parcels of land is peppered with remarks like, “I paid a pretty penny.”

So, you know, I think this has not changed much. Here was this fairly successful artist from New York City who wanted a particular piece of land and particularly because it had a view. And so the local farmer knew he had somebody on the hook there.

Not much has changed in Columbia County. Not much has changed at all.

And so, Church was fortunate. He was able to do that. Cole died penniless, basically. So yes, it was quite an enterprise.

I think the key thing was he had an artistic vision for the landscape here. He was buying pieces of land that had been clear-cut, had no trees on them, that were scrubby, you know, sort of full of briars and wet marshy land that wasn't good for much agriculturally, but still nevertheless had been subdivided and purchased and made into small farm plots and wood lots for farms and things like that.

And so, just like what was happening in New York City, the greatest enterprise of his lifetime was Central Park. And he was deeply involved in Central Park. And he was close friends with Olmsted and Vaux in Central Park. And so he was doing a little microcosm of that up here. So instead of thousands of acres on Manhattan Island being kind of knitted together through landscape design, he was putting 250 acres together in what he called “landscape architecturing.”

Okay. So was Olmsted or any of those really well-known landscape designers involved at all in the layout of the land here, or did he do it all himself?

Not explicitly. No. Vaux was hired to work on the main house with Church, but Church was principally his own architect. Church was certainly his own landscape architect. Now, they knew each other. They were intimate friends. They were good friends. Can they not have discussed this over dinner in the several clubs they all belonged to in New York City, particularly the Century Association?

Absolutely. They must have, right? Was there something passed on the back of a menu or something between them? Who knows? We don't have it if it does survive. And I think that's been a struggle for the 20th and 21st century history of Olana, is that because it's known that Church was so close with Olmsted and Vaux, there's been an assumption that therefore they must have done this work. But no, he was an artist. And the landscape direction was an artistic one.

It was kind of bringing art into the manipulation of rock and dirt and trees and plantings and water. And you know it took 18 seasons of hand excavation to create the 12 acre lake at Olana. So that was begun before Church even finished the first house that he and his wife moved into here, the house I'm speaking to you from Cozy Cottage, that wasn't finished until 1861.

That first summer, he has laborers set about starting to excavate a swampy area to create the lake. So you know this is a vision. He's got an idea. And he isn't able to acquire the big view at the top of the hill until seven years later. So the big house goes up with the big view. And that is the second phase. The first thing that happens is he creates a farmhouse and he buys a farm, this 126 acre farm, has a little two-room, very humble farmhouse on it.

He's not going to move his newlywed into that and live their life of fame and celebrity there. So he builds a lovely little picturesque farmhouse, very intentionally sort of artistically designed with clipped gables and diamond paned windows and all of the latest style of that period. And so it's an incredible, consistent vision over 40 years to create Olana.

Would you give us some background into how he did come to design the house in the style he did? And what was happening with architecture in the United States then? Did it inform at all what he built and how he decorated it, or did he just depart completely?

Excellent question. So definitely the first house here, Cozy Cottage, the farmhouse, was totally right out of verse and chapter of Calvert Vaux's Plans for Villas and Cottages or Downing Before Him.

It is a gentleman's country seat, but of a modest type, a little farmhouse that sits in the landscape. And that's the emphasis. This is a reaction against Greek revival architecture with the white columns out in the middle of farmland in New York State. They hated that. So this is the next phase where you get these cottages sort of nestled into the landscape. Now, when it gets to be the big house, though, it's quite a dilemma because he wants it on top of the hill. He's not going to nestle it necessarily into the landscape.

It's going to be quite prominent. And in some sense, it is a realization of Cole's writing about the Hudson River where he said, "It will one day be like the Rhine and the castles of the great and famous will dot its shores." Right? So in some sense, Olana, you know, Church realizes his mentor's vision of building a castle of his own. And he does refer to it as a castle, a little bit tongue in cheek when he's doing it. So he starts out with an architect.

Before he makes his journeys, he buys the top of the land in 1867. His good friend, Richard Morris Hunt, one of the most prominent architects of his generation, the first American to be trained at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He does some designs for Church that survive. They are what Hunt wants, which is Hunt has just come back from the French Alps. He wants an alpine chateau out of stone.

And so then Church and his wife and his mother-in-law and their little baby go off on this great journey. And they just fall in love with the architecture of the Middle East, of the Near East, of particularly Damascus and Beirut. Those two cities, they spend a lot of time in. This is not uncommon for wealthy Americans at the time to make this a destination because it is also the Holy Lands.

You know, it has that sort of pilgrimage aspect to it. But for Church, it's very much an artistic journey. And he is fascinated by architecture at this point in his life. He really makes a big shift in his own paintings to move from pure landscape subjects to ones in which architecture is integrated into it as essential elements. So for instance, the painting of Petra that's at Olana, that view, right?

So he has taken a crash course down in New York on the classical orders and architectural drafting before he goes away so that he is able to capture better the ruins that he knows he will see. But they're also celebrity travelers. So in Damascus, the British Consul invites them to dinner and throws a big dinner party for them. The British consulate happens to be in this amazing historic palace in the center of Damascus with a great interior courtyard.

All of these features that they fall in love with - Middle Eastern domestic architecture. So you're in an urban setting, but you have an open-air courtyard in the middle with fountains and gardens and plants with tiles and color, you know. Mostly there in the stone and in hard surfaces, inherent color, not so much paint. There's a lot of tile and ceramic work. So this is what Isabel writes about in her diary.

And, you know, who wouldn't have a magical memory of being fetted as the great American artist and his wife by the diplomats of Europe in the Middle East, right? It's a very international experience. So when he comes back, he spends a little time working with Hunt again. Doesn't go anywhere. I've done a talk that's on our website all about this where he decides, well, I do need an architect who knows how to build things to help me here.

But I know what I want for design.  I worked for an architect for a while. And you know there's a sort of modern-day distinction where you have a design architect and an architect of record. Somebody has to stamp the drawings and hire the engineers and make sure that it all stands up and doesn't fall down. That was Calvert Vaux, ultimately, here at Olana for the main house. The Englishman who was brought over in the 1850s and made his name as the designer of literally dozens of Hudson Valley homes.

Unfortunately, most of them now gone. And Church is the design architect. He's his own architect in that way. And there's several famous quotes about him that really back this up. But one of them is that later in his life, he does an interview for a Boston newspaper. And there's a lot about the architecture of the house in it. And he responds to, were you your own architect, Mr. Church? He says, “I certainly was.

And as the lady said of her turtle soup, I made it up in my head. It's entirely my own fiction.”  And I do think it is. Ultimately, it does have a lot of stylistic influences. The Middle East is a major one. There's a lot of East Asian as well. There's even kind of enamel terra-cottas from China that are incorporated into the bell tower here and things like that. But ultimately, one of the best terms that I've seen used is an Artist's Handmade House. There's a book by that name.

And the author's name is escaping me at the moment. But Olana's in it. And it's a great term because as an artist, he's using it as a laboratory for what fascinates him most about architecture. And I think color is a big part of that story.

Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, what do you think his guiding principles were in the design of it? I mean, besides the reference to the East.

I think that it was going to be on top of a hill that was going to have amazing views. And I think he helped.

And that was what Calvert Vaux was known for, was sensitive sighting of buildings and homes to capture views. So Olana is, although it's one of the great Hudson Valley houses, it's not like the Vanderbilt Mansion or the Mills Mansion or even Oak Hill, the Livingston home that's right down the hill from us on the river facing the Hudson with a boat launch and the railway running down along the shoreline. This is up, removed from the river to capture great panoramic views.

And it is angled specifically to capture the motif that Church painted in his studio pretty much every day of his life, which is where the Hudson Valley and the Catskill Mountains meet as the Overlook Mountain comes down to meet the plateau. And then the Hudson opens up and turns down towards New York City through the mountain ranges, right? So that was what Olana was about. If there's an image that is Olana, it is that, I think, in Church's mind. So, the site was determined, I think, that way.

And then he does write in letters that when he's traveling, he said, I have 1,000 ideas for home building when I return. And he launches into it immediately on his return. He launches into The Great Project. And one of them, he said is that I will have a stone-built house, or I will have a house that is a masonry structure. No wood for me. You know, he wants a permanent home. He's a great man. He would say he's humble, but you know it wasn't so much. And you know he wants a monument.

He's creating something to last, right? And then I think the design principles are very much about a sense of space and the interior. So it's a house that's designed from the interior out. And from the outside, it can appear a little ungainly. There's a lot of plain, unrelieved wall expanses. They were in Church's lifetime planted. Now we don't plant the exterior of stone houses because it's so damaging to the mortar and creates another maintenance headache.

So but it would have been planted in church's lifetime. And so it would soften the edges of it a little bit. But the interior court hall, the heart of the house, was explicitly inspired by these experiences of these great urban palaces in the Middle East on their travels. But how do you do that without a Sultan's budget, but on a painter’s, albeit a successful one’s? And how do you do it in a climate where you cannot have it open to the air?

So color comes in in a big way. So instead of marble, precious stones, even much mirror, there are a few key places where mirrors are used, he turns to paint, his medium. He's a painter. First of all he's a painter. He does become an architect. He does become a landscape architect, most certainly. And one can argue he becomes an interior designer.

But paint and color are his chief seat of inspiration.

So he used color and pattern as his version of creating, this Middle Eastern aesthetic.

Yes. Exactly. This feel and this openness. So I think one thing that sets Olana apart for its date, construction started n 1870 and finished in 1875, is that not only is it one of the earliest in Western architecture, even before Leighton House in London, is its use of Middle Eastern motifs and forms.

But it's also well ahead of Frank Lloyd Wright by almost a generation in creating an open interior space with views outside from pretty much every principal space rather than these little boxes that are joined by double sliding doors.

And you know when you come into Olana, you immediately see right through the heart of the house.

Right, right. Isn't that principle called enfillade when you could just look down a row of rooms lined up, one into the next?

Yes, that's from a palace architecture, you know like Versailles or something. But in this case, it's one that's a pretty short enfillade, but it's dramatic. You look right through the center of the house.

Got it. Got it. Walking into Olana is kind of an otherworldly experience. I mean, I've never seen an interior like it.

From the Arabic pointed arches to the number of colors used and which colors, as well as all of the patterns adorning the architecture. Cliches is like jaw-dropping and awe-inspiring don't really cut it. It's just so different. Describing colors is often a losing proposition because we all see color a little differently, and we also use different words to describe the same color. But I wanted to give the listeners an idea of what the house interior looks like.

So I'm going to give it my best shot, and you can chime in. So no room is one color, and there are often more than three colors per room. So in other words, not just wall, trim, and ceiling. There's no white in the house. Most doors are highly decorated with stencil designs on them, which have very Middle Eastern looking motifs like we've been talking about. The casements or openings between rooms, as well as trim, are often multiple colors and patterns also.

When you walk into the house, there's a small vestibule that is painted a saturated orange with a salmon pink trim around the door. And the bottom half of the walls are covered in Islamic-looking tiles that are white, gold, and blue. And then you enter through here into an entry that is painted the most vibrant violet color. I love it. And it's not a color you see in houses now.

And just the juxtaposition of these bold colors together, the orange and the violet, really let you know you're in for something different. The colors are mostly dark and employ both warm and cool hues with a predominance of warm ones. The colors are often very muted, not always, but many of them are muted. And here's just an abridged list of everything I saw.

There are many types of greens, celery, moss, mint, chartreuse, all kinds of browns, tan, taupe, ochre, and other earth tones. Gold, light blue, maroon, burgundy, peach, brick red, deep purple, yellow, turquoise, and more. And if you could believe it, it works. It's incredible that it works. To me, a lot of the colors are tied into landscapes, you know maybe not the bright orange or the purple, but all of these earth tones just make me think of his paintings of land.

Do you think that that's what it comes right out of?

You know I do. And you know I've been here 10 years, and I think it was only year seven that I sort of had this epiphany one day, this feeling I had when I was in the main house, in the interior. So it's like if I look around here, everything, the color, the motifs, the symbols are about nature. It's a home in nature. And of course, he's a landscape architect.

He's a lover of Humboldt and of science and of George Perkins Marsh, who was writing the first book about man's impact on the climate and on the environment as leading to what was known as desertification. We would say drought and deforestation. I mean, so these are issues. And so, yes, that makes sense. You know, this is a monument, as famous art historian David Huntington said about Olana, a monument of Emerson, of Whitman and Thoreau’s America.

Of an America before the Gilded Age that had discovered its landscape, had discovered that industrialization was laying waste to it. And then the Gilded Age happened, right? Then Reconstruction happened. But it was, to my mind, a great bright moment in our history that Olana stands testament to.

We know that he sent sort of whiny letters to friends saying he can't attend some social event because he's tied down, dictating to the contractors every little detail, including mixing the colors on his palette and showing them how to mix it appropriately for larger surfaces. You know, he is intimately involved in it and Isabel, as I've said, probably was not recognized for her contributions as she should have been.

But Church as the artist was absolutely intimately involved in creating this palette. Now, if you look at two of the important source books for the patterns, the stencil work, they are these wonderful, lush, beautifully illustrated, including some color illustrations, French books on Persian architecture or on Arab architecture. And the Churches owned these books, most likely acquired perhaps in Paris, perhaps through Isabel's father.

We don't know for sure. Certainly, New York then was like New York City is today. You can find anything you want there. So we have these two books in our library. If you look through them, you can see that there's a seed of the patterns that come out of them. In fact fairly explicitly taken, like the principal door stencil right out of Modern Arab Art.

And also for the door stencils and a lot of the stencil work, the idea of building in metallic powders into the paints to give them reflective quality. Now, all of those surfaces have oxidized. So unfortunately, we don't have the reflective surface effect from Church's lifetime.

So if you think about the darkness of the colors you so wonderfully described, think then about the contrast with these reflective shimmery silver and gold surfaces, right? I would love one day to do a set of the doors, a reproduction set, and have them painted in that historic way with those metallic pigments. Now, this is something I never studied in architectural history, but apparently it was quite a common practice in the 19th century to use metallic pigments.

In the case at Olana, it was bronze to create a gold effect and aluminum to create the silver effect, right?

Mostly on doors and not on walls?

Well, on some of the walls, but mostly on the doors. Now think, why is that? Well, this is a house designed before gaslight even. It's plumbed for gas, but we don't know that he ever had a source to get gas into it. So it's candles and oil lamps, and it's dim, and you've got to have reflective surfaces wherever you need to have access, right?

I mean, why do you think brasses are on bureaus, right? I mean, that's how you found out where to pull the handles and get your night shirt out. So it's a house before electricity. It's a house even before gaslight. And so I think that's a whole other subject, a fascinating subject to me that I've been learning a lot about just here at Olana, working with exhibition designers who know all about optics and the way in which the eye works and the way in which it compensates. And one of the big issues we have at Olana is lighting.

Next year is the 200th anniversary of Church's birth. We have 100 projects that are going to be open and done. One of them will be our first enhancements to the lighting and the interiors to try to give them more even tone so that your eye can see the paintings and the artwork better. And that's what it would have been more like in Church's Day, because there would have been many more window treatments than we have now. But of course, light is a key part of perceiving color.

Oh, absolutely. You hit on a number of things I was going to ask you, which was because there wasn't gas light and it would have been candles and kerosene, do you think that affected the colors that were used in a way? If you think the lighting was dimmer and more spotty, you would think you'd go with lighter colors because there was less light. And yet he went for these really dark ones.

Well, that wouldn't have reflected the richness of the design aesthetic that they loved here.

You know, and this is also the look of Tiffany interiors. They're very dark. The Park Avenue Armory, those interiors…. They're lugubrious. But that was something that was felt to be very appealing at this moment in time. And we're talking about the 1870s to about 1890 in that 20-year period is when and there are two main phases of the interiors of Olana. There's the first phase, 1870 to '75, and then there's later 1880s renovations that happen.

And that's under a designer who's a distant relative of Isabel Church’s named Lockwood de Forest, who worked with Tiffany, went out on his own, was the first American designer to design and source Indian-style fittings, mostly carved wood and have them made in India. He set up his own manufacturing in India. And so that's another interesting layer at Olana in the 1880s. And I find it fascinating what we do know about who did this work under Church's direction, the painters.

First of all, it's a very local story in the sense the Mason was from Catskill, a man by the name of William Smith and Son. And the painters in the first phases of the house were the Tobey family from Warren Street in Hudson. Their shop was located at the sign of the whale's jawbone. Oh. Believe it or not, it's a whaling town. And the whale jawbone is still preserved in the Robert Jenkins house down on Lower Warren Street, the Daughters of the American Revolution Museum.

If it's ever open, go in, look for the whale's jawbone. It used to be out on the street as a sort of emblem of the city. And so I love that that's how they advertised where their shop was, the Tobey family. And then Church, very interestingly, didn't take students in a very explicit way. But he was very respected, very revered, obviously, as an artist, and he was very sociable and friendly with other artists.

And so he connected through the Albany artist, Erastus Dow Palmer, a sculptor who set up the Albany Institute, with Palmer's son, Walter Launt Palmer, who wanted to be a painter. And so he came to Church. And through Wally, as he was known, he met a young man from Albany by the name of Herbert Myron Lawrence, who would go on to become an interior designer. He was born in 1851. He died in 1937.

He worked on the 1880s redecoration of the White House under Chester Arthur, one of our few gay presidents, who refused to move into the White House until it could be repainted. Now, if we're guessing about his sexuality, now I think we know it for sure, right? And in any case, Herbert Myron Lawrence worked at Olana off and on for Church for 10 years or so, and there's a lot of evidence of payments and talk about him coming and doing this and that.

So he's training and breaking in as a young man under the tutelage, of the great painter, Frederic Church. So fascinating to think about that. And the Chester Arthur White House was done by Tiffany. So Herbert Myron went on to work for Tiffany.

Ooh. Do you think that there were apprentices and other people who helped with the sort of minutia, like the creation of the stencils?

Oh, I think they were doing all that yes. You know, they were doing all that work. I think it’s typical, both in paintings and in the design of the house. And there are over 700 drawings surviving in his hand for the house, for the interiors, for every detail of the woodwork, for the stencils. We have the original stencils themselves, not just the preparatory drawings for them, right? And they're splattered with paint. And well, the state, when they repaint, which they're about to do in 2027, the exterior, all that decorative work is going to be redone.

They obviously use the original stencils and color match to create the custom colors. But Church's typical working method was to sketch something in pencil and then to refine it and refine it. And so we have sketches for the stencils. And then he obviously would have had, whether it was Lawrence or Walter Laun Palmer ,if he was visiting, or others help, or some of the workmen, the painters from Tobey, or others would help.

There was an Albany firm too, I think, called Gladding, who was advertised for doing gilding, graining, and glazing. And anyway, so you know again, local people.

Yeah. That's great. So it was such an unusual house. How was it received by the public? I mean, did people think it was outrageous that it was so different and unlike other things? Or did it add to his mystique?

Certainly, it added to his mystique.

I mean, it was notably visible from across the river. And as you cross the river, today on the Rip Van Winkle Bridge, back in the day on ferries, it was a house that was meant to be seen. And you know we don't have a lot of evidence of writing about it, which is interesting. There are a few articles. There's that one from 1890 in the Boston paper.

And in that Church sort of admits that he did design the house. What did he say? Something like it helps to see it in the right light. And I think I've experienced that in terms of the exterior of the house. If you're here in the summer at sunset, there is a strange phenomenon. And maybe you as a color person have seen this, or can it help explain it, where there's almost a rose hue that comes across the sky at sunset.

And it helps to unify the house in the landscape. And you just feel like, wow, this must be the moment Church designed it for, right? You know because otherwise, in certain lights, like in winter light, it can be quite hard and sort of harsh. But the stone is right from the site here. You know, it's blasted out of the mountaintop, out of the hilltop, and reused to build the house. The core structure is brick. And that's what the Hudson Valley brickyards that were up and down in this area were known for, was creating structural brick, not facing brick.

That usually required a finer grain of clay. So Philadelphia was famous for its facing brick. But New York brick, Hudson Valley brick, was used for structure. And that's the bulk of the brick. And then you put a sheathing on. So Church, instead of using brick in most places, although the bell tower has exterior brick, he used this bedrock that was blasted out of the hilltop.

So W.S. Smith was in charge with basically taking this shrapnel of rock and sticking it onto the brick structure of the house.

Wow. What kind of stone is it?

It's shale. You know my geology is many, many decades ago now. But I asked the geologist once, and he told me it was shirt and shale. Not very good building stone. It cracks. Under pressure, it turns back to clay, essentially, right?

It's got that kind of orangey terracotta kind of color.

Yeah. Church referred to one of the hills here as Red Hill. And it's at the southern end of the property right by our new visitor center. And if you look at the soil there, you can see the iron oxide in the soil, and it creates a kind of reddish ochre. But up by the house, it's a little bit more brown.

One of the great color quotes I have to share from churches is there's a quote where he's speaking kind of poetically, waxing poetically. And he says, “there goes Isabel,  astride a milk white donkey riding the red veined hills of Olana, right?

Oh, yeah. Very poetic.

Today, you know I believe they use Benjamin Moore, on one of the more recent jobs.

          And again, I don't even know exactly what type of paint Church used.

           On the interior, they used Benjamin Moore?

          Well, we did. It was just before my time here, so more than 10 years ago, that the

           flat, unstenciled, undecorated surfaces of the house interiors were repainted           based on chemical analysis of the paint. Each room, has what preservationists call  a            tell, which is a little place, usually discreetly, is a little square showing what the surface            looked like before they did the restoration work. And you can see how considerably            deteriorated it was. You know The color is lost in a lot of these places. But the stencil           work has never been repainted. Thus, it does not have the metallic finish. They did not           recreate that.          

It has been cleaned very painstakingly by conservation painters and others working to clean it with dry erasers and other techniques like that. But it is faded. So you do get this faded effect. But the saturation of color is the original color on the flat surfaces without stencil work.

I went up to the wall in a few places and it almost had this sort of filmy milkiness to it. And I think old paints were often linseed oil mixed with pigment.

It didn't give that impression to me at all. But again, it could have a lot of layers. It could be how they restored it.

Well, if you want to talk to the architectural conservators at the state, they can probably give you the chemical analysis.

Any idea if it was a mixture of natural pigments and synthetic pigments, or we don't know?

You know, I do believe there were a lot of natural pigments used. I know that Church in his own painting career took great advantage of technological advancements, right?

So plein air painting existed way back into time. You know, Impressionists made that into the whole focus of their art. So Church was trained by Cole to paint outside, but it was in Church's lifetime that portable tubes of paint, ready-mixed, became available. And it made that process transformed. And it basically created Impressionism as we know it.

That center section of the downstairs, which you mentioned before, I'm not sure if it's the only very glossy ceiling. It's one that really stood out to me.

It is. That is an important point. Yeah, it is Robin's Egg Blue. My understanding is that it is literally just the transposition of a typical 19th-century porch ceiling, that glossy Robin's egg blue that was intended to hint at the sky and make it feel more spacious and open as you're sitting on the porch because they had originally framed it out so that the skylight that is on the second floor landing would have been visible and brought light right down into the center of the house.

But for whatever reasons, we don't know for sure, he decided not to keep that opening. And so he had to use this sort of technique, again, that glossy paint.

Got it. Got it. He added, if I'm correct his painting studio was added closer to 1900.

It was finished in 1890.

Do you think since it was X amount of years later, that the colors he used or the way he applied the paint, or the number of different colors used, does it feel different in your mind to the rest of the house built earlier? Do you think it's different?

It would be great to really analyze and look at that. I mean, I'd be interested to hear your thoughts about that. We do love that rich kind of reddish-brown color that he paints the studio, the primary color in the studio.

In fact, we love it so much, we replicated it on the entry wall of our new visitor center. So that color is there. And oh, by the way, to encourage everyone who loves color to come to see the visitor center, the architect built into each of the gender-neutral restrooms, they're full enclosed stalls, each stall on the back wall has a tile that's a color from the house palette.

Oh, I love that.

Right now, we're only open Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. In April, we'll open on Thursday.

And then in May, we open six days a week. You can get tickets at the New Visitor Center. It's intended to be a place where you stop. You know, most of our visitors are first-time visitors, amazingly. And so we want them to sort of stop there and have a chance to get oriented. There will be more exhibits than there are currently. And to go see one of the original views in nature that Church composed, it's at the bottom of the lake, right above the new visitor center. So just up the stairs from the end of the visitor center is this original artwork by Church in three dimensions.

And we want that to be the introduction to Olana, because the house is in it. The house is the summit. The house is your destination. But it is far from the only thing. So at Olana, we don't use the word grounds because really the landscape is primary, and the architecture is subsidiary. So for the average visitor experience for the last 54 years, that has not been the case because really the access was provided to the house primarily and less to the landscape.

But we're doing much more now to provide access to our visitors and interpretive access tours. We have electric vehicle tours that take you on all five miles of the Carriage Road network that Church personally designed. And it takes you to a sequence of views, just like if you go to one of the picturesque gardens in England like Stowe or Stourhead or something like that. We have our own version here at Olana.

Anything else you think our listeners should know?

Oh, gosh. It's been fun to talk. We don't talk enough about design and your passion for color and your knowledge of color.

So Amy, I really appreciate your interest and would love to have you stay involved and help us understand more about it. You know, your question about what happened with the studio wing. Interesting to explore.

This has been so much fun. I thank you so much for your time.