Worlding on the Hudson: Frederic Church and Global Histories of Art

Abstract

Frederic Church's inflated claim for his property on the Hudson River is both earnest and contrary (plate 1). The definite articles do not prevaricate -the possessive is additionally certain. There is, however, contextual equivocation. When Church penned these lines to his fellow artist he had just returned from an extended trip to the cultural capitals of Europe and sites of ancient culture around the Mediterranean. 2 He was well aware of the peripheral status of his local art world. Here is a paradox that prompts the question: what kind of world is this? Addressing this question about Church's orientalist house and his landscaping might seem peripheral to a special issue that grapples with British art and the global. Yet I too am earnest and perhaps a little contrary in claiming this as a productive vantage from which to view the unsteady conjunction of an already unstable category -British art -and its relationship to the call for a more expansive geography of art's history. 3 It is my contention that regional orientalisms, with their cosmopolitan claims and internationally networked cultural politics, unsettle the boundaries of nationally circumscribed histories of art. Orientalism is an ambivalent fulcrum between cultures, and Church's orientalist interior on the Hudson -a place busy with paintings, objects and architectural ornament both accrued and designed by the artist over a thirty-year period -is thus a resonant place from which to consider such historiographic challenges.Recent scholarship has invited us to address the connectedness of nineteenthcentury British and North American art -the ways paintings anticipated their transatlantic journeys and the pitfalls of a national chauvinism that occludes the Britishness of American art. 4 Like his teacher, father of American landscape painting Thomas Cole (whose more modest property is situated a few miles from Olana), Church's world is transatlantically entangled. But if Cole embodies the Britishness of American art, then the orientalist home of his student on the other side of the Hudson River demonstrates that this transatlantic connection is but one vector in the multiple geographies of Church's world.Even the property's name, Olana, allows us to parse some of these complexities and the project's multiple embeddedness in other epistemologies of worlding. Olana is derived from Olane, the treasure-storehouse and fortress on the frontiers of Ancient Armenia, recorded in Strabo's (64 or 63 BCE-24 CE) world history, Geographica, which Church came to know through the writings of British philologists. 5 If Cole's work