Landscape with Two Trees

In March 1860 Frederic Church bought a hillside farm of 126 acres near Hudson, New York, looking across the river toward the Catskills. For years he and his wife called it simply the Farm, and their small house Cosy Cottage. Church ran it as a working farm, kept a dairy herd and started planting trees, thousands of them in the end. He painted there from the start, and around 1864 he put up a studio on the land.

This little upright sheet belongs to that moment. Along the bottom he wrote July 1864, and the study gives most of its height to two trees. On the back is a later inscription, Olana 1864. Olana is the name the estate took with the Persian-style house Church built on the hilltop in the 1870s. In the summer of 1864 there was only the farm. The sheet left the family at some point, and the museum bought it in 1982 through a New York gallery.