Olana

Olana is the painter's house — the Persian-fantasy mansion Frederic Church built on the Hudson bluff, the Hudson River School's biggest star making his last and largest work in brick and landscape. 'I can make more and better landscapes this way than with canvas and paint,' he wrote, and Olana was the proof.

The house is the composition — Church and Calvert Vaux's villa with the stenciled walls, the Middle Eastern arches from the Beirut-Jerusalem-Damascus trip, the windows that frame the views he designed the carriage roads to reveal. The whole 250 acres is the painting — the lake he made from a swamp, the vistas he cut, the house that was his masterpiece after the arthritis took the brush.

The estate is intact — the interiors as they were in the 1890s, the collections still in place, the carriage roads still running the routes Church designed. The file keeps the artist's last work: the painter who built his own subject, the Persian house on the Hudson, and the landscape that is the painting.

Olana is the archive's painter file — Church's 1872 Persian villa, the landscape he composed instead of painted, and the intact house that's the Hudson River School's best survival.