(bright music) - [Annik] Frederic Church is quintessentially, fundamentally, existentially important in the American story.

He introduced this country to its own landscape.

- [Victoria] He was a painter.

He spoke in images.

He paints as if for dear life.

He put all of that emotion into his paintings.

(lightning strikes) - [Elizabeth] In the 19th century, landscape was in the air.

- Understanding a landscape is deciphering the intimate balance between the ecology of a place and the culture that shaped it.

- [Ellen] He's somebody who saw, I think, the potential for landscape to be something that unifies people.

He came back and he said, "Look how wonderful the world is.

Look how lucky we are to live in this extraordinary planet."

(gentle music) (bright music) - [Announcer] Funding for Language in Landscape, The Art of Frederic Church" is provided by a grant from Empire State Development, and I Love New York.

Learn more at iloveny.com.

Mark Twain, when he went to see Frederic Church's painting, The Heart of the Andes, in the 10th Street Studio for the first time.

He was so entranced by this painting and he would go again and again and again and he said, "Every time I come here, I see something different.

It's a totally new painting."

And that's true about Olana too because of the change in weather, because of the change in light.

So you never see the same place twice.

- Olana is a 250-acre work of American landscape art.

It was created by the artist Frederic Church over a period of 40 years, 40 years that exactly paralleled his incredibly successful career as a painter.

Olana is Church's greatest master work.

It is the place that he and his family lived and created together.

- The notion that Church first begins as a landscape painter before he's a landscape maker really taught him how to slow look, and then over time, to think about that in three dimensions and how to create choreographed landscape experiences, not just for people, but almost as a way to capture nature.

- [Annik] You've got the foreground, you've got the middle ground, you've got the background.

Things that he did with oil and paint on canvas, he's now doing in this landscape.

- The word landscape, which seems like such an innocuous word, is actually a really interesting one because it has a lot of implications that we don't often think about.

We don't all exist outside just as viewers.

We actually are in the middle of it, and we're creating it for better and for worse.

(bright music) - In the 19th century, landscape was a focal point for the New World, for the United States.

They were a new nation and their distinguishing quality was the extensive, seemingly endless lands that made up the United States at the time, and then the undeveloped lands in the west.

(bright music) - The entire genre of landscape painting really is the barometric pressure of the mood of the nation.

And if you go back and read the poetry, the sermons, the songs, the editorials from the time period, you really come away with a complicated but also really rich environment in which to situate not just his paintings, but everybody else's.

Church is not an outlier.

He just happens to be at the vanguard doing it on a scale and at a level of sophistication beyond a number of his colleagues.

- The 19th century is such a global century in terms of, you know, connectivity and capital and industry, and Church is a part of that world.

Many of the conversations that we have now about the global world, about the environment are ones that he's sort of engaging in and thinking about.

- He takes all these ideas, embeds it in his landscape paintings, and so these landscape paintings become a visionary access to his own time.

(gentle music) - Church was born in Hartford in 1826 to a commercial family.

His father was a businessman, very successful, and his mother, like most women of the day, was a homemaker.

And very early in Church's life, you know, he was five, six, seven years old, he was already sketching and sketching and sketching on anything he could get his hands on.

Thomas Cole was one of the first of a group of painters to celebrate the stunning Hudson River Valley.

- Cole was smart enough to understand that the wilderness in the United States would come to define the promise of the new world, and he was also an artist very concerned about the destruction of the wilderness, even in his young years in the 1820s and '30s.

And he saw as a great threat to the United States.

So landscape becomes a fascination for all kinds of reasons.

- He comes to study with Thomas Cole in Catskill across, just across the river here from Olana in June of 1844.

- He was taught by Cole to do plein-air onsite oil studies, including a code, a number code for colors.

He writes comments on these sketches.

Church excels beyond all comprehension in plein-air painting.

- Cole was really the founder of what became known as the Hudson River School.

In this 1870s, 1880s, that term became a term of derision.

- It's a retrospective term made up by a bunch of younger artists to try and make their sort of parental generation, Church and Cole is like a grandfather, to make them seem provincial, old fashioned, to marginalize them.

- To group him with the Hudson River School really does a disservice to his contributions to American art and culture and to his painterly vision, which was much more expansive and cosmopolitan.

- After he finishes those couple years with Thomas Cole, makes his way to New York City like all young artists did then and still do today, he becomes the youngest person ever elected into the National Academy of Design.

His studio was in Greenwich Village on West 10th Street.

- Church was really proud of his New England heritage.

He saw it as sort of the ultimate expression of what the colonists had fought for against Great Britain.

- Hooker's company was kind of one of the first chances he had had to really prove himself.

The painting is meant to depict the Puritan Minister Thomas Hooker traveling from the Massachusetts Bay Colony to what will become Hartford, leading this group of about 100 or so people.

Some of his ancestors themselves were part of Hooker's company.

The feature that really sends it over into this realm of fantasy is this presence of what is unmistakably known as the Charter Oak.

People believe it may have been planted in the 12th or 13th century by ancestral Saukiog people and they had settled the region of Hartford.

In 1687, Connecticut colonists at the time, and hearing that this British colonial agent was gonna come to rescind their charter essentially and have them force them to sign a new one, the Colonial Hartford residents took their previous charter, went to this tree and hid it amongst its branches as kind of an act of defiance.

He's really trying to show not just nature, but people in relationship to nature.

Even when you're not maybe necessarily purposefully engaging with indigenous history, it's actually still a part of this story.

It's still a part of the story of his ancestors making it to Hartford.

- Church was already starting to find a new way, a new language for celebrating the United States while using nature more and more to speak for the United States.

(gentle music) After many, many summers exploring New England, Church went to the American South for the first time.

He went with a friend and patron named Cyrus Field.

First, Church stopped and sketched Washington's tomb at Mount Vernon, which was a site of pilgrimage then as it is today.

Then they went on to a site in western Virginia called the Natural Bridge.

Thomas Jefferson bought the land that it was on.

- One of the important things about Church's decisions in the way he paints Natural Bridge is the fact that he shows you Patrick Henry as a free man of color, basically as the tour guide for Natural Bridge.

- It was Church's most explicit engagement with the institution of slavery.

Church seems to be suggesting the arch for the United States is not a carved triumphal arch.

It's this stunning natural formation.

That's what the United States is.

We can see its values coming from the landscape.

- It's a subtle painting, but it is also one that carries a pretty strong punch.

Cyrus Field is an abolitionist.

Church's friends in New York are abolitionists.

His patrons are by and large abolitionists, and so he is not shy about working that into his artworks where it is important.

- Early on, Church, he clearly wanted to strike out on his own.

And rather than using European art, art of the old world as his great inspiration, Church decided not to do that.

He rather decides to follow the new developments in science, and he was very influenced by the German naturalist Baron von Humboldt.

- Alexander von Humboldt was the leading naturalist of his day.

He was endlessly curious and had a suspicion starting in the 1790s that everything on the planet was in some way interconnected.

Humboldt became internationally recognized when he began lecturing and publishing on the work that he had started in South America in 1799 to 1803.

- Church was inspired to go to South America by his reading of Alexander von Humboldt's multi-volume work "Cosmos", in which Humboldt called for landscape painters, specifically really talented landscape painters to go to, to go to the tropics and capture this incredible ecosystem.

Church went once in 1853 to Ecuador and New Granada, today's Columbia, and he went to Ecuador in 1857.

Church was on Humboldt's trail.

He would go, you know, say goodbye to his family and go for months to places where he could easily have been, you know, killed by a wild animal, fallen more likely prey to malaria.

His religiosity, his spirituality, I think had had a great deal in common with that of Emerson or Thoreau.

He felt God's presence in nature above all.

The more he learned about the complexity of nature, the more reverence he felt towards it and towards the God he felt had created it.

When he felt tiny and he painted a huge landscape, paradoxically, he felt most alive.

He didn't feel insignificant.

He felt connected to the entire cosmos.

- Church's first big waterfall picture is Tequendama Falls that comes out of his first trip to South America, and he gets hammered in the press for not being able to paint water very well.

And Church's response to that is to basically say, "I'll show you."

(water flowing) (gentle music) And he goes to Niagara Falls and he paints over 100 sketches in pencil and in oil.

(gentle music) Church decides to immerse us in the middle of this painting.

There is no foreground.

We are up to our knees in water.

- He helped change the way Brits and Europeans saw the United States.

Finally, it was clear that you could have world class art out of North America.

- His virtuosity is on view.

His clap back to the press is a brilliant rejoinder, but it is also Church's way of saying that he is going to compete with himself.

Each painting is going to have to surpass the one beforehand.

All of the biomes that we recognize today, from grasslands to tundra, to Taiga to the Arctic that are still in use today, Humboldt essentially codified that.

One of the, the sketches that turned into the single most important infographic, I think, of the 19th century is Humboldt's, what we call his Plant Geography Map.

Church will end up using that Plant Geography Map as the basis of the Heart of the Andes.

(bright music) - Most 19th century landscape paintings are compositions.

They're not accurate, topographical renditions of exactly what's in front of him.

You'll see that in paintings like "Heart of the Andes", which was composed from these plein-air studies and took him an extensive period of time, this grand scale.

They, these paintings were called Great Pictures at the time.

He decides to do a one-off showing of this single painting and charge admission price of $0.25 per person.

- Crowds of people are lining up to see a single work of art and to spend, you know, maybe an hour with it and to often look through opera glasses to get a sense of all those details.

- One critic said he wanted to kiss the painter's feet.

People were in tears in front of the painting.

He was doing something that no one else dared do or could do.

He put his life on the line to do it.

People adored him for this.

- And thousands and thousands of people came to see it over a period of months.

(bright music) - Among those crowds was a young lady from Dayton, Ohio, named Isabel Carnes.

She was with her mother Emma, and they visited multiple times.

So the story goes that he arranged as she was exiting on one of her viewings of "Heart of the Andes" to kind of run into her and get introduced, and so that began the rest of their lives essentially.

They were engaged and married in June of 1860.

(gentle music) - The great issue in the United States in the years when Church was rising up as a young artist was the issue of slavery.

- He began painting paintings that I can only call anxious and ominous.

"Twilight in the Wilderness" is set in Maine.

He's painting while John Brown is, you know, raiding Harper's Ferry.

This is the moment he's painting.

It's clear to everybody that Civil War is very likely.

Nature gives us all the material we need to express human emotion.

(gentle music) - In 1861, one of Church's closest friends in New York, the author Theodore Winthrop, signs up.

He volunteers to be an officer.

He is the first union officer to die in battle.

New York goes into mourning.

Church is devastated.

- Cotopaxi was painted in the middle of, in the 1862 in the middle of the Civil War, and it is also about the Civil War.

- Cotopaxi is in full eruption.

It is reds and oranges.

It is an angry painting full of lava and smoke, and it comes out right after Frederick Douglass delivers a really important speech called "The American Apocalypse", and he refers to slavery as America's moral volcano waiting to erupt.

This is not a coincidence.

Frederic Church is channeling his time.

(gentle music) - Frederic purchases 126 acre property here in what would become Olana, but at that time was a farm called the Wynson Breezy Farm.

This young cosmopolitan couple decides to build a new house on their farm.

It was finished in 1861.

They're going to be starting a family and he needs to have a home.

During the Civil War, Church and his wife Isabel had two children, Bertie and Emma.

Both his children died within ten days of each other of diphtheria.

They went with several friends to Jamaica to recover.

He worked on a painting called the Vale of St.

Thomas.

It could be taken to be speaking about the United States after the Civil War.

Or, it could be taken to speak about his return of hope after the loss of the children.

He and Isabel and their young son embark to go to Europe and then to the Near East and the Eastern Mediterranean and to Ottoman Syria.

His mind is so energized by the things that he is seeing in that part of the world, and Isabel also writes in her diary of these remarkable places they go.

He writes to his good friend William Henry Osborne back in New York, that he has 1,000 ideas for house building.

- And then he comes back and builds Olana.

- Church does engage Calvert Vaux to help him with the design and particularly the construction of the house, but really all of the plans that survive, and there are hundreds of drawings that survive, they're in Frederic Church's hand.

(gentle music) The house is obviously the most visible and dramatic part of it, but it also includes the farm.

It also includes cozy cottage.

It also includes the lake.

It includes the five miles plus of carriage roads that Frederic Church personally designs.

- In a way, Olana is a quintessential 19th century landscape, in that it is embodiment of many of the principles of the picturesque.

We have the revealing of sight over time through movement, in particular, the carriage roads.

You have these dramatic vistas that open up after being enclosed in a dark forest.

There's a kind of rhythm to your experience - When you go to visit Olana, it is about the power of the borrowed view.

It is Frederic Edwin Church who takes you on that journey to see the landscape the way he wants you to see it, to read it in very much the same way he might ask you to read a painting.

- Church had a really strong sense of civic duty.

- He became a founding trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, not surprisingly.

- Frederick Law Olmsted, he asked Church if he would accept to be nominated for the Parks Commission.

- Church was very involved in placing the great Egyptian obelisk.

right outside the Met to signify the fact that the Met was collecting Egyptian art.

Later on in his career, he was centrally involved in establishing the area around Niagara Falls as a park.

- Olmsted credited Church with having advanced this idea in a speech that Olmsted heard at the Century Association where they were both members 10 years before those parks were established.

- In the case of Church, it wasn't just about making a place that was beautiful.

He was also giving us a roadmap about why the borrowed view, why the conservation of rare expanses of scenery are so critical to the environment that we move through every day, and that they nourish our souls.

- He did have constraints put on his painting by his terrible rheumatoid arthritis, but he kept painting till the end.

- He was traveling to Mexico creating a body of drawings, plein air studies that were masterful in their execution.

- He becomes one of the first artists to have a memorial exhibition at the Met.

(gentle music) - In August of 1964, Sally Church passes away at Olana.

The estate determines that they will dispose of Olana, they will sell Olana.

Word reaches the art historian David Huntington.

He leads the campaign to save Olana.

There's a bill put forward to acquire Olana as a New York State Historic Site.

- The thing that singularly defines the Hudson River Valley landscapes and landscape making is in fact the notion of the historic viewshed And those borrowed views should be protected at every cost.

- It was a Frederic Church painting that really became the behemoth that stopped a nuclear power plant from being built just outside the view that we're looking at now.

This really is a landmark in the story of preservation in this country.

Landscape matters.

The portrayal of a landscape, the experience of a landscape, the way that we all live in a landscape, the way that we understand it, the home that we make in it, the history that it contains, that all those things are so precious and so important.

- So it's been in the last decade or so that the Olana Partnership in particular has led working with the state a continued restoration of elements of the 250 acre historic landscape.

- When I first arrived to Olana, once Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape architects had been engaged by the Olana Partnership and the State of New York, what I saw were the obscured edges of a very intentional landscape.

(gentle music) What we were able to do through our research is find out where had those margins or edges of the forest he planted been?

And then the more impoverished forest that had just grown up successionally after his time, we were able to remove that forest to reestablish these long view corridors.

So bringing back that intent allows us to more clearly see what Church was thinking and believing as he built Olana.

(gentle music) There's still more to do restoring the house environs, the exact grading, the garden experience around the house.

What is exciting is there's still more to come to even know Church better.

(gentle music) When I look at some of Church's masterpieces and you feel the connection between spirituality and nature, it's very visual.

When you stand at Olana and the light shifts and rays of light come down and reflect off the Hudson River as you're standing outside of the umbra, the spirituality moves up through your entire body.

You have stepped into the nature that Church wanted to connect us to.

- He's somebody who saw, I think, the potential for landscape to be something that unifies people.

And I think that's a very profound legacy, because I think that as an artist, in a way, your job, if you can be said to have a job, is to create conversation.

To create spaces or experiences that seduce people into having a new thought or new appreciation for something.

- Whether that means a large scale oil painting or the, you know, extraordinary land that he creates Olana the house, I think that's such an important thing in our ever connected and fast moving world to sort of have that opportunity to look deeply and learn about the past, to sort of see closely the land that he was seeing and representing.

(gentle music) - I think if Church has something to teach us, it's that we need to look at the world around us the same, with the same precision that he looked at the world around him.

There's so much detail, there's so many layers of thought, there's so much observation.

There's such sophistication in Church's own interpretation of nature that every generation will find something new.

(gentle music) - [Announcer] Funding for "Language in Landscape, The Art of Frederic Church" is provided by a grant from Empire State Development and I love New York.

Learn more at iloveny.com.

(bright music)