Olana State Historic Site

In the sitting room at Olana hangs a painting of El Khasné, the temple-like tomb carved into the rock at Petra. Frederic Church, the Hudson River School landscape painter, rode there in February 1868, while his wife Isabel stayed behind. In 1874 he painted it for her and designed its frame, and the room's colours were chosen to go with it. It still hangs on the wall he made it for.

Olana was Church's own home, a hilltop house above the Hudson River near the town of Hudson, New York. After his journey through the Middle East he set aside an earlier plan for a French-style manor and built a Persian-inspired house instead, with patterned brick, stencilled arches and windows framing the river and the Catskill Mountains. The architect Calvert Vaux, a co-designer of Central Park, worked with him, but the ideas were Church's own. He shaped the 250-acre grounds the same way, laying out carriage roads and a lake like a composed landscape.

After his death in 1900 the family kept the house largely as he left it, so the rooms still hold his paintings, oil sketches, furniture and objects from his travels. When the contents faced sale in the 1960s, a campaign of admirers stepped in, and New York State acquired Olana in 1966.