Frederic Edwin Church was the most celebrated American landscape painter of his time. Born in Hartford CT, when he was eighteen he went to study with Thomas Cole in Catskill NY where they went on sketching trips in the Hudson River valley; the Catskill Mountains; and the Berkshires in Massachusetts. He would eventually purchase a property across the Hudson River from where Thomas Cole had lived.

The youngest artist to be elected to the National Academy of Design, Church maintained a studio in New York and quickly built a reputation for his naturalist views of New England. In 1857 he gained international acclaim for his monumental painting of Niagara Falls and, two years later, after two visits to South America he executed a massive 10-foot painting depicting the Andes which stunned audiences around the country. As was his custom, he toured the work in a one-work exhibit charging twenty-five cents admission and it proved a huge financial success: 12,000 visitors in New York in the first three weeks alone. He would eventually sell it for the highest price ever paid for a work by a living American artist up to that time. It is now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In the 1870s, Church expanded his property and built his Persian-inspired “castle” which he named Olana. During this time Church served as a Parks Commissioner in New York’s Department of Parks and was a founding trustee of the Met, but he also developed rheumatoid arthritis which severely impeded his painting. After his death in 1900, his son Louis continued to live at Olana into the 1960s and it is now maintained by the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation.