American Art Collaborative

Frederic Edwin Church, the most successful artist of the Hudson River School, built a grand house, which he named Olana, on the summit of a prominent hill on the Hudson River facing the Catskill Mountains. During his first winter there Church wrote that “nearly every day” he made “a study from my studio window of a sunset or twilight.” These studies were exercises to work out delicate problems of color and light. Here, in one of the largest of the more than twenty surviving studies, he used a restricted palette of bright whites and cool greens and grays to suggest the crisp coldness of a winter’s day.