Honoring Frederic Church: Beyond the Hudson River School

This article is part of our Museums special section about how institutions are commemorating the past as they move into the future.

The name Hudson River School has long branded the magnificent canvases depicting nature in all its drama and detail by Frederic Church and his teacher, Thomas Cole, among other 19th-century American landscape painters, including Albert Bierstadt and Asher B. Durand. Coined originally as a slight in the 1870s by younger artists and critics who considered this work outmoded, the term stuck.

“The phrase Hudson River School did a terrible damage to their reputation because it implies they were provincial,” said Tim Barringer, an art history professor at Yale University and a co-curator of the exhibition “Frederic Church: Global Artist,” opening May 17 at the Olana State Historic Site — the former home and grounds designed by Church in Hudson, N.Y., with commanding views of the river.

“This idea of a backwoods school of art simply doesn’t fit the canon of Church’s work, which is so ambitious and largely stimulated by his global travels,” Barringer added in a video interview together with the exhibition’s other co-curators, Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser and Jennifer Raab. “He’s clearly a figure who’s highly cosmopolitan and absolutely modern in what he’s doing.”

To mark the 200th anniversary of Church’s birth in Hartford, Conn., in 1826, more than 50 museums — from the Honolulu Museum of Art to the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid — are highlighting their holdings of the artist’s work in special exhibitions and installations this year, alongside several new publications on the artist.

Taken together, this curatorial and scholarly focus offers a comprehensive reappraisal of Church as a prominent public figure concerned with the hot topics of the 19th century, from new scientific thinking to slavery to the preservation of green spaces for the public good.

“The fact that he was a founding trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1870 until his death in 1900 and introduced major initiatives during that 30-year period has never been discussed before,” said Kornhauser, curator emerita at the Met and consulting curator for Olana’s bicentennial initiative.

The exhibition includes a refined 1898 oil sketch of a church in Cuernavaca, made during one of Church’s 15 trips to Mexico over his last three decades when “his career was just dismissed as he had arthritis,” Kornhauser said. “It’s simply not true that he wasn’t painting.”

On those trips, she added, he grew passionate about Mesoamerican art, which he collected for Olana. He convinced the Met to collect the ancient art of the Americas as well, and create a department for it at a time when American museums were very Eurocentric.

Church first came to the Hudson Valley at age 18 to apprentice with Cole, who lived across the river from Hudson in Catskill. On a hillside that Church would purchase 15 years later, Cole taught him to sketch from close observation of topography and weather. Church would then orchestrate these details into panoramic compositions at his studio in New York City.

In the 1850s, inspired by the writings of the naturalists Alexander von Humboldt and Charles Darwin, Church followed their paths on two trips to South America, where he made studies of volcanoes in the Andes.

He later traveled to the extreme north in Newfoundland to paint icebergs, to Jamaica for its flora, and in 1867 set off for 18 months voyaging through Europe to the Middle East, where he was deeply influenced by Eastern aesthetics and architecture.

“Church does make his home here,” said Sean Sawyer, president of the Olana Partnership, which stewards the site together with New York State, “and it is incredibly important for his mind-set, but he’s somebody who then makes a point of traveling, and his artistic life is really tied to scientific advancement of the age.”

Church first found fame and wealth charging admission at his studio in New York City to see his 1857 painting “Niagara” — presenting the waterfall with awesome immediacy as a precipitous drop into a chasm (reproductions of the painting were a popular wedding gift). “This painting becomes a way of seeing and understanding nationhood,” said Raab, an art history professor at Yale.

The exhibition includes a drawing of a tepee at Niagara, but Church choose to eliminate all Indigenous presence in his final composition. The hefty companion publication “Frederic Church: Global Artist” includes 17 essays, several considering Church’s work within the context of Indigenous and settler histories in the Hudson Valley.

For his 10-foot-wide painting “The Heart of the Andes” from 1859 (now in the Met’s collection), Church not only charged admission to view it in his studio, but also used the new railroad system to take it on tour around the country in its custom-built frame.

“He was a really expert marketer of his work,” Sawyer said. With $10,000 from the sale of that painting, Church bought his first 126 acres in the Hudson Valley in 1860. (Olana would come to encompass 250 acres over his lifetime.)

A committed abolitionist, Church borrowed back this renowned work in 1864 to display it at the Metropolitan Fair organized by the U.S. Sanitary Commission to raise funds for injured Union soldiers. “We argue that the war and slavery are present in his work, absolutely vividly through the blood-red sunsets of some paintings from the 1860s,” Barringer said. “Our Banner in the Sky” (1861), for instance, included in the show, depicts the heavens like an American flag being ripped apart above a stark landscape.

After Church and his wife returned in 1869 from the Middle East, where they went on a collecting spree for their future home, Church began to design a Moorish palace. The name Olana most likely refers to a reference in Strabo’s Geography about a fortified treasure house in ancient Persia.

Sited near a hilltop, the result is a pastiche of polychromatic design motifs evoking Persian architecture, even though Church never made it to Persia. The interiors brim with rugs, textiles, ceramics, stones, beads, photographs and artworks collected abroad and intermixed with Church’s own work in a kind of cabinet of curiosities.

While contemporary visitors have tended to view Olana as just the house, Church saw the entire landscape as the work of art, with the house an element in the design — just as Belvedere Castle is an element in the design of Central Park, said Mark Prezorski, Olana’s senior vice president and landscape curator, during an interview at the grounds.

Church was close with the landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, who designed Central Park, and he served as a commissioner of the park in the early 1870s, another little known chapter in Church’s career.

In ways that echoed Central Park at Olana, Church sculpted a man-made lake from swampland and a greensward from a rocky hill; replanted deforested land with thousands of native trees; and designed five miles of carriage roads through the property.

“We’re trying to help people to understand that Frederic Church, a painter, goes into three dimensions and this is an earth work, this is a composition,” Prezorski said. “He’s creating a landscape and then painting it.” (The author Annik LaFarge, who lives nearby, gives readers a walking tour through what she calls Church’s greatest work of art in her new book, “Composing Olana.”)

Jeffrey Gibson, the first Indigenous artist to have a solo presentation in the U.S. Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, in 2024, is another neighbor and frequent visitor with his dog to Olana. He is a recipient of a 2026 Frederic Church Award, as is the author Victoria Johnson, who has just published “Glorious Country,” the first biography of Church. The award is bestowed by Olana to recognize extraordinary achievement in American art and culture.

“Certainly I’m aware of the criticism of Hudson River School painting, that being the lack of representation of the First Nations people who lived there and whose land this is,” Gibson said. “We’re in a period where nuanced conversations are not in abundance. I wouldn’t have accepted this if I didn’t feel that the people who approached me from Olana are open to that kind of conversation.”

The artist intends to make site-specific work at Olana in the future. “Part of it just starts with acknowledging the history of that land and the history of those paintings and of that school itself within American culture,” Gibson said. “It’s a very powerful history.”

Where to Find Frederic Church

“Global Artist” (May 17-Oct. 25), nested within Olana’s architecture, collections and landscape, offers the most complete experience of Church’s vision. Other exhibitions this year include:
“Guests of Honor: Frederic Church’s Cotopaxi” (through Oct. 25), Detroit Institute of Arts
“Splitting the Horizon: Frederic Church Between Border and Bridge” (through Aug. 30), Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Poughkeepsie, N.Y.
“Framing American Democracy: Radical Roots” (April 23-Sept. 27), The Wadsworth, Hartford, Conn.
“Niagara Falls: Mist and Majesty” (May 2-Sept. 20, 2026), National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
“Frederic Church in Vermont” (May 22-Aug. 9, 2026), Middlebury College Museum of Art, Middlebury, Vt.