Born in Hartford, CT Church was raised in a prosperous, long-established New England family where his artistic and cultural interests were nurtured from a young age. In 1844, Church traveled as a teenager to Catskill, NY to study painting with Thomas Cole, the foremost landscape painter of his time. In the years to follow, he evolved as the nation’s greatest landscape painter of the late 1840s and 1850s, never wavering in his connection to the Hudson Valley and its landscape. In 1860, Church settled in the valley and established his home, Olana. For Church, the designed landscape at Olana was an easy extension of his artistic interests, the result of which revealed the link between Church’s pursuits as a painter of landscapes and the allied art form of landscape gardening.