Treasures from Olana

Avery place the work into the context of Church's life and travels and examine Church's influences and the public reception of his art. Throughout Treasures from Olana, they discuss how profoundly Church's hilltop home and the surrounding landscape inspired and informed his work. His paintings, in turn, illuminate Olana more than a century after his death. The Olana Partnership, Hudson, N.Y., and New York State's Office of Parks, Recreation, and Historic Preservation, Albany, N.Y., organized Treasures from Olana: Landscapes by Frederic Edwin Church.

Kevin J. Avery (curator) is an associate curator in the Department of American Paintings and Sculpture at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. He is the author of Church's Great Picture: The Heart of the Andes, which accompanied an exhibition of the same title at the Metropolitan in 1993, and of numerous catalogue essays and articles on the subject of nineteenth-century American landscape painting. He is also editor of American Drawings and Watercolors in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Volume I (2002), and coeditor of Hudson River School Visions: The Landscapes of Sanford R. Gifford (2003), the catalogue of an exhibition that originated at the Metropolitan and traveled to the Amon Carter Museum and the National Gallery of Art. John Wilmerding is Christopher Binyon Sarafim '86 Professor of American Art in the Department of Art and Archeology at Princeton University and visiting curator in the Department of American Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. He is author of many books and articles on American painting and was recently reappointed by President George W. Bush to the Committee for the Preservation of the White House.