Thursday, January 27, 2011

Husdon (for Hudson)

Frederic Church (1826–1900) was a leading member of the "Hudson River School" of landscape painters, a movement founded by his teacher and fellow artist, Thomas Cole. Church spent much of his adult life traveling the world and recording what he saw. He was primarily interested in natural history; his gorgeous paintings are suffused with rich layers of light and shadow. At the age of fifty, Church was afflicted with rheumatoid arthritis. This eventually made painting impossible and the last twenty years of his life were spent decorating Olana, his amazing, Persian-style abode on the Hudson River. As he once proudly stated: "Almost an hour this side of Albany is the Center of the World—I own it." We found five instances of Husdon in the OhioLINK database, and 72 in WorldCat.

(View from Olana in the Snow, 1873, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

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