The Hudson River Valley

Beauty of the land inspired paintings -- and an artist's home called Olana

Author: By Judith Bell, Globe Correspondent

Date: SUNDAY, September 27, 1998

Page: M13

Section: Travel

Church first discovered this site, which he called ``his hill,'' when he was a student living across the river at Cedar Grove, the more modest Catskill home of Thomas Cole, the painter credited with founding the Hudson River School of landscape painting, America's first native school of art. While the reputations of the painters would experience similar declines and resurrections in the latter part of the 19th century and in our own time, respectively, the houses of student and mentor experienced quite different fates. The exotic Olana, located in Columbia County, is a New York State Historic Site that remains virtually unchanged from the day Church wrote his letter to Longfellow, while Greene County's Cedar Grove stands empty and in serious need of restoration.

But the best opportunity to appreciate Cole and Church exists just beyond their residences in the beauty of the Catskill Mountain Preserve that provided them and other painters of their generation with inspiration and that remain for us today essentially unchanged. Here along the northeast rim of the Catskills, the mountains rise to 3,000 feet. From the precipitous ledges just east of North Lake, views sweep into five states, while the landscape below drops to sea level at the Hudson River. The waterfalls, the lakes, the glens, and cloves that once drew artists and lovers of nature alike are sill found along paths originally blazed by 19th-century area resorts.

My first exposure to the beauties of the Hudson River Valley that Church so lavishly boasted about were vicarious. As an art history graduate student, I spent hours in darkened lecture halls viewing slides or in museums studying paintings by Church and other artists of the Hudson River School of landscape painting of such Catskill sites as North/ South Lake, Kaaterskill Falls, and Kaaterskill High Peak. A recent advertisement for a guided walking tour of the favorite Catskill haunts of these painters mentioned these places I knew only from paintings. What would it be like, I began to wonder, to walk through a landscape I knew so well from paintings? Last fall we decided to find out.

We began our tour in the town of Catskill at Cedar Grove, the family home of Thomas Cole. Originally a large farm with river views to the east and mountain views to the west, the land has been reduced to a small parcel wedged in a commercial strip. Recognized as a national Historic Landmark, the yellow Federal-style frame house still stands and is structurally sound, although it is run-down, and has been closed to the public for the last few years.

The Greene County Historical Society, which has made a proposal to acquire the property from the Thomas Cole Foundation, estimates that it will cost upward of $450,000 to restore the house. The society is working to get the house released to the Catskill Center for Conservation and Development, which would restore the property and eventually turn it over to the society. ``Our goal,'' says Raymond Beecher, Greene County historian, ``is to operate the property not just as another historic house but as an interpretive site for Thomas Cole as an artist, early conservationist, and lover of nature.''

Cole took up residence here in 1836 when he married Maria Bartow. His name had become as attached to the Catskills as that of Cezanne to Aix-en-Provence, with numbers of artists, including John Frederick Kensett, Jaspar F. Cropsey, Sanford Robinson Gifford, Asher B. Durand, and James Doughty, following him and his great success into the Catskill Mountains.

Before 1825, the year Cole first unveiled the paintings he made from sketching trips into the Catskills, the landscape of America was thought inferor to that of Europe. ``It was considered wild, uncultivated, and monotonous in its undeveloped state,'' says Pat Murphy, one of the owners of Highland Flings, the company providing historic hiking and walking tours of the Catskills that guided our visit to the region. ``Painters were told if they wanted to paint landscape they should go to Europe and paint classical landscape. Cole's accomplishment was momentous. He changed the American sensibility about its own landscape.''

Cole's fame ascended along with the rise of the romantic movement, which had at its core the belief in the aesthetic value transcendental attributes of nature. The Catskills, with their combination of beauty, grandeur, and accessibility to New York, the country's largest and wealthiest metropolis, became the leading motif in the American romantic movement.

Traveling westward on Route 23A from the town of Catskill, we passed over the first part of the Old Mountain Road that Cole would have taken on his hikes into the mountains. We stopped at a lookout over Katterskill Clove, the most prominent pass penetrating the wall of the Catskills. This sweeping panorama of the Hudson River Valley is dominated by Kaaterskill High Peak, a favorite motif of Cole that I recognized immediately. While he made at least three paintings of the Clove, Cole was not always concerned with producing faithful renderings of nature. He used the mountain repeatedly in the composed lanscapes of his later paintings of Italian scenes and in his large-scale allegorical paintings.

From here, Cole would have followed the Old Mountain Road, now a foot trail, up through Sleepy Hollow to the mountaintop. This part of the road belonged to the Catskill Mountain House, a great luxurious hotel located in the midst of hundreds of square miles of raw wilderness. Built in 1823, the 315-room hotel stood on a rock table plateau at the edge of the escarpment, the precipitous cliff overlooking the Hudson River Valley. Visible as far south as the Hudson Highlands and north almost to Albany, the white neoclassical building spanned by 13th Corinthian columns representing the 13 original colonies commanded the mountaintop. Steamboats passing at night would point their searchlights on the Mountain House so passengers could view the landmark; searchlights mounted on the hotel returned the salute.

In time, the hotel developed a system of walking trails throughout the Pine Orchard, the four-mile radius surrounding the hotel. Located between the peaks of North and South mountains, the plateau included the large rock ``platform'' that protruded beyond the edge of the mountain to form the foundation of the hotel, North and South lakes, and the pine and hardwood forest where a number of falls and dramatic overlooks could be found. Other attractions, like the Kaaterskill Falls, were reached by a network of well-kept trails and, by the end of the century, a system of finely graded carriage roads.

Visitors today, advises Murphy, can most closely duplicate the wanderings of the hotel guests and the Hudson River School painters by walking America's first hiking trail, the 24-mile Escarpment Trail. ``The Hudson River artists spent more time on this particular path than any other in the Catskills. Few hikers today realize that the landscape this trail passes through was once the most famous in the eastern United States and was known throughout the world.''

The principal sites known to and named by 19th-century travelers constitute roughly a six-mile hike. The trail begins at Bastion Falls in the Kaaterskill Clove, just down 23A from the overlook, and follows the rim of the clove to the Catskills' northeastern edge.

Walking this portion of the trail, I soon realized why it had once been so popular. The terrain is varied and changes frequently, providing dramatic mountain and valley view as well as more intimate experiences of nature.

From Sunset Rock and Inspiration Point, we looked down into the depths of the clove. I recognized views that Cole had sketched from these same vantage points. Coming out of the Clove, we saw the first of many panoramic views of the Hudson Valley. The trail climbs to North Point, going up a series of ridges and through woods thick with mountain laurel. The trail becomes an old carriage road, a relic from the days of the Mountain House and its rivals, the Kaaterskill Hotel and the Laurel House, and passes through Puddingston Hall, a rock formation named for its pebble-studded conglomerate rocks. As we approached the Mountain House site, the landmarks become more numerous. Fairy Spring falls over a ledge into a moss-lined basin; Elfin Pass, a very narrow fissure, follows, along with Druid Rocks, a formation of several detached rocks of conglomerate.

We came out at the former Mountain House site and the ledge on which the grand hotel once perched. Abandoned since the early 1940s, the hotel lay in ruin for decades and was finally burned by the New York State Conservation Department in 1963. The site is barren except for an information kiosk that gives a brief history of the region and the resort and its competitors. The panoramic view of the Hudson River Valley and the Catskills that drew such visitors as Ulysses S. Grant, Jenny Lind, and Oscar Wilde is here, of course. Along the surface of the rocky escarpment, which once lay just an unbelieveable 50 feet from the hotel entrance, is the lone evidence of the site's glorious past. Graffiti carved by the hotel's long-ago guests cover the rocks. Studying the carefully carved names and dates, some that date to 1824 when the Mountain House first opened, I was struck by how different our concepts of time and leisure are today. I could imagine these 19th-century visitors whiling away afternoon after afteroon, slowly chipping at the stone, leaving their mark on this experience of nature that so marked them.

We headed up the sharper contours of North Mountain. Many artists, including Cole and Church, rendered the Mountan House from this Northern end of the Escarpment Trail, and in particular from Artist's Rock, where the view of the protruding ledges of the Mountain House site is particularly dramatic. A hundred feet on is Prospect Rock, where Cole once brought friends to show them the location of his home in Catskill, some 12 miles away. The 2,123-foot elevation of Sunset Rock earns its name for its views of the western peaks of the Catskills and down the clove to the Hudson Valley.

The trail turns away from the escarpment, running into a solid wall of rock. In the 19th century, hikers scaled the wall with a large wooden ladder. The park service reconfigured the trail to the top of the ledge in the 1960s. At the top, we discoverd deep crevasses, caves, and a view that takes in North-South Lake, all of South Mountain, the ridges of Kaaterskill High Peak and Round Top on the other side of the clove, and the full basin of the Hudson Valley, as well as mountains in Connecticut and Massachusetts.

A visit to Church's Olana, six miles south of Hudson, provided a fitting close to our Catskills tour. Church died the last year of the century, and his career marked the culmination of the romantic landscape in America. Church applied his mentor's lessons to huge panoramas of some of the world's most dramatic and exotic scenes. With photography still in its infancy, his paintings provided viewers with an immediate experience of previously unseen worlds. He achieved Spielberg-like celebrity and financial success previously unknown to an American artist. Thousands stood in line outside his New York studio, paying a then substantial 25-cent admission fee, to see paintings like ``Niagara'' and ``The Heart of the Andes,'' which sold for $10,000 in 1859, then the highest price ever paid for a landscape in America. The average viewing time by gallery visitors was an hour, with many bringing binoculars as though they were studying actual nature.

The Civil War and the Reconstruction period wrought changes in the nation's mood and in the artistic climate, which saw the rise of the influence of French Impressionism. Church's popularity declined, along with that of other artists of the Hudson River School, and the house and 250-acre grounds of Olana came to occupy his creative energies.

Influenced by a trip he and his wife, Isabel, took to the Middle East in 1867, Church commissioned Calvert Vaux (a collaborator on the design of Central Park) to design a house in the ``Middle Eastern'' style. In letters written from the Middle East, Church praised the flat-roofed houses constructed around a central court, the use of decorative tiles and marble, all elements that found their way into Olana.

We entered the house at the eastern facade. At ground level, the masonry wall's only opening is a small window and a fanciful arch outlined in plychrome tiles, which makes the balcony and windows above seem all the more mysterious and inaccessible. The interior of the entranceway with its Siennese red walls and tiled banquettes presages the strong color palette and love of pattern that define the interior. Salmon, eggplant, green, turquoise, and sienna are the dramatic colors of Church's paintings and ones that he mixed on his palette for the interior of Olana. The now-faded stenciling created by Church with powdered bronze and aluminum once caused one reporter of the time to exclaim at their glittering surfaces, ``One feels as if transported into the Orient when surrounded by so much of Eastern magnificence.''

The view from the vestibule takes the eye straight through the house to the studio. An expansive plate glass window trimmed with amber tinted glass and an Islamic fretwork frames the view of the west bank of the Hudson. The rooms that open off the central court hall are cluttered with comfortable furniture, art work by Church and family friends, family portraits, and the souvenirs the Churches were passionate about collecting -- Persian armor, a Mexican Madonna, mounted butterflies, a pair of life-size bronze cranes atop turtles -- all of which make it easy to imagine that the Church family has only stepped out.

Olana was inhabited continually by members of the Church family until 1966, when it was sold to the New York Office of Parks, Recreation, and Historic Preservation. ``This is a house about memories,'' says director James Ryan. ``It's not just objects and a house where someone lived; its' about human life. This house feels as though it's bursting at the seams and it is.''

No room in the house exemplifies this point more clearly than the family's private sitting room. ``Mr. Church planned the room around his painting of `El Khasne, Petra,' the pink sandstone temple he saw in Jordan,'' says Ryan. ``It was the one important picture of his that he kept at Olana. He took the slate blue of the walls and the green of the ceiling and the color of the pink-marble fire-surround directly from the painting.'' In this same room, Ryan pointed out small works Church painted as gifts for his wife. ``This sunrise and sunset commemorate the deaths of two of their children. Just below them is a scene he painted in Mexico, where he went for his worsening arthritis. You can see his technique failing him, but Mrs. Church called it the most beautiful painting ever done.'' A large oil by Thomas Cole hangs over the chaise longue. The reduced-scale desk that Church had built for his diminutive wife is also here, as are brass curios and textiles collected during their travels.

Oriented to the west and south, the house takes advantage of some of the most beautiful views of the Hudson River. Luckily, the grounds are open to sunset. We joined other late-afternoon visitors at the southwest facade to watch the sun set over the Hudson. As the fading light glinted off the sinuous river and drenched the blue mountains in purple and gold, I remembered Church's words: ``About an hour this side of Albany is the center of the world'' -- and was glad I at last knew them to be true.

For reservations/information contact Highland Flings, P.O. Box 1034, Kingston, NY 12402, 1/800-HLF-6665. Email: HLFlings1(at sign)aol.com

Visitor Center. Greene County Tourism and Information Center, Thruway, Exit 21, Catskill, NY 12414; 800-355-CATS. Open seven days a week, 10 hours a day, wheelchair accessible.

Historic Houses. Olana, Route 9G, Hudson (one mile south of Rip Van Winkle Bridge). The best approach is to get off the Governor Thomas E. Dewey Thruway at Exit 21 in Catskill and take Route 23 east across the Hudson River. Cross the Rip Van Winkle Bridge and look straight up at this Persian wonder. It's the most spectacular of all the surviving homes of the Hudson River Painters. The grounds of the 250-acre estate of Frederic Edwin Church are open year round daily, 8 a.m. to sunset. The house is open April through October. House and tour hours: Wednesday through Sunday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tour admission: $3; $2 for the elderly; $1 for children 5 to 11 years old; free for children under 5. Admission to the grounds is free. Reservations suggested for tours.

Cedar Grove, Thomas Cole's house. 218 Spring St., Catskill, NY 12414. Cross the Rip Van Winkle Bridge going west and turn immediately onto Route 385 south; the house is a few hundred feet on the left.

Dining. Charleston, 517 Warren St., Hudson; 518-828-4990. Catering to the weekend New Yorker drawn to the antiques stores along WarrenStreet, the Charleston serves sophisticated New American cuisine. Open for lunch Thursdays and Fridays, 11:30 a.m. to 3 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, noon to 3:30 p.m. Dinner: from 5:30 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays; from 4:30 p.m. Sundays; closed Mondays through Wednesdays. New American cooking.

LaGriglia Ristorante, Route 296 in Windom. Northern Italian cusine with Nouveau American touches.

Carolina House, Route 9, Kinderhook; 518-758-1669. Open for dinner only, daily except Tuesdays, beginning at 5 p.m.

Lodging. Albergo Allegria, Route 296, Windham, NY 12496; 800-ALBERGO; 518-734-5560. Albergo Allegria is Italian for Inn of Happiness, and after a two-night stay we can attest to its well-deserved name. The AAA 4-Diamond Award Queen Anne mansion has 15 guest rooms and 6 suites, the latter of which include a whirlpool and a fireplace. A gourmet breakfast, including fresh baked breads and croissants, omelettes, Belgian waffles, and pancakes, is included in the room rate, which begins at a midweek rate of $65. The inn is a 30-minute drive form North-South Lake and Olana.

Stewart House, Water Street, Athens, is a 19th-century Italianate hotel located directly on the Hudson River. The hotel is five miles north of Catskill, very accessible to Olana. High season, May through October, $85. Double occupancy includes a full breakfast served in a charming dining room.

The St. Charles Hotel, 16-18 Park Place, Hudson, NY 12534 (518-822-9900) has 34 rooms, priced form $59 to $89, including a continental breakfast.

The Inn at Green River, 9 Nobletown Road, Hillsdale, NY 12529 (518-325-7248) has four rooms, two of which share a bath. Prices range form $75 to $125 in the high season, and from $85 to $55 from November to Memorial Day. A full breakfast is included.

Suggested hikes. North/South Lake Park, 2.3 miles east of Haines Falls, N.Y., on Route 18. Admission: $5 per car; $1.50 per person walking in. Call 518-589-6191.

Catskill Mountain House site -- a half-mile hike from the North Lake Beach parking lot. While the dramatic structure no longer stands, the breathtaking views of the Hudson River Valley and the Taconic and Berkshire mountains -- on clear days you can see into five states -- are as entrancing as they were reputed to be in the last century.

Also clearly marked within the campground are paths that lead to such lookouts as Artist's Rock and Sunset Rock, which provide dramatic views of the lake and the Hudson River far below. Inspriation Point and Sunset Rock look directly into Kaaterskill Clove and across to Kaaterskill High Peak.

Kaaterskill Falls, Route 23A, Haines Falls. At 260 feet, these are the highest cascading falls in New York state. They consist of two tiers: The upper falls drop 175 feet, and the lower falls drop 85 feet into the rocky basin. The 1.4-mile walk to the mist-shrouded base of the falls begins outside the campgrounds at the parking lot on route 23A, 1.3 miles east of North Lake Road.