Hudson River Schooled

The Asher B. Durand exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, the New-York Historical Society, and the National Academy of Art this summer may give New Yorkers a chance to view beautiful New York landscapes, but there’s another, perhaps even more thrilling way to commune with such scenes: to visit the Hudson Valley spots where the Hudson River School artists lived and worked.

More than 400 people had one of the grandest experiences the region offers Saturday at a fund-raiser on the grounds of Olana, Frederic Church’s Moorish-style home in Hudson, N.Y.

Dressed in orange, blue, and burgundy hues to match the color scheme of the house, guests also recalled the tremendous sunsets over the Hudson Valley visible from the grounds. More is in store: the Olana Partnership is building a visitor’s center and museum, and hopes that the restoration of the second floor will be completed in time for the 2008 season. It has never before been open to the public.

The president of the Olana Partnership, Sara Griffen, hopes the strong attendance at the party marks a turning point.

“We’ve been perceived as an elitist place at the top of the hill,” Ms. Griffen, said. “So we decided on a low ticket price. It’s not about raising money, it’s about friend-raising.”

“We want to be welcoming and accessible,” the chairwoman of the Olana Partnership, Jazz Johnson Merton, said. “People who are interested in art, historic homes, and landscape would all be interested in Olana. They just need to get up here.”

Some New Yorkers are already in the know.

“The whole thing is what I love, the experience of being here,” a former design director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art who is now a special advisor to the director, Jeffrey Daly, said.

The director of the Neue Galerie, Renee Price, said, “I think it’s so exotic to have something like this.”

“I think the Chinese bed is splendid,” a curator of decorative arts at the Brooklyn Museum who serves on the national advisory board of the Olana Partnership, Barry Harwood, said, referring to an object that will become a focal point of the second floor tour.

A board member of the Olana Partnership, artist Will Cotton, started the evening with a tour of the home’s bell tower, which is not open to the public. Yet his favorite room is still the studio Church added in the last 10 years of his life, particularly a suite of chairs that were recently conserved to match their original upholstery, a Louis XVI-revival yellow silk damask.

Church purchased the 250-acre property, which has a view of his teacher Thomas Cole’s more traditional home, Cedar Grove, in the 1860s. He hired Calvert Vaux to help him design the house, inspired by his travels to Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon. He lived in the house until 1900, and it remained in the family until 1964, when private citizens raised the money to purchase it and transferred its ownership to the state of New York.

“It’s totally mad,” a retired publishing executive, Patricia Tornborg, said of the current Olana. “I’d live in a house like this if I had the money.”

agordon@nysun.com