The Pastures

Taken on the farm property of Frederic Church on the Hudson River Valley, N.Y.
Frederic Edwin Church (May 4, 1826 – April 7, 1900) was an American landscape painter born in Hartford, Connecticut. He was a central figure in the Hudson River School of American landscape painters. While committed to the natural sciences, he was "always concerned with including a spiritual dimension in his works."

In 1845, Frederic Church first sketched on the property that was to become Olana.[7] He was then a student of Thomas Cole, now considered a founding figure of the Hudson River School of painters. On March 31, 1860, a few months before his marriage to Isabel Carnes, Church returned to purchase a 126-acre (51 ha) hardscrabble farm on a south-facing slope of a hill in Columbia County, near the thriving towns of Hudson and Catskill, New York. The first element he added to the property was a small country cottage, believed to have been designed by Richard Morris Hunt. In addition, Church laid out gardens and orchards, dredged a marsh to create a 10-acre (4.0 ha) lake, planted trees, and built a studio. Frederic and Isabel Church called their house "Cosy Cottage" and their property "the Farm".
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