The stories of American artists don’t live only in their paintings. They live in the books that ask new questions of old work, and in the letters, journals, and biographies that bring us closer to the people behind the art. At HAHS, we believe reading around an artist is part of understanding the work itself: where pen meets palette.
Each month we choose a book connected to an artist, a place, or the wider world of American art history. Some are biographies. Some are field guides. Some are the very books that sat on an artist’s own desk. All of them are worth your time, and all of them will send you deeper into the stories these extraordinary places have to tell.
June 2026
Glorious Country: How the Artist Frederic Church Brought the World to America and America to the World
by Victoria Johnson (Scribner, 2026)
“See for yourself this glorious country, where we reside.”
— Frederic Church, in a letter to a fellow artist
Published on the bicentennial of Church’s birth, this sweeping biography follows one of the great 19th-century American artists from his Hudson Valley studio to the jungles of South America, the icebergs of Newfoundland, and the ruins of the ancient world. Victoria Johnson, whose previous book was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, traces Church’s life through his letters, sketches, and diaries, and in doing so tells a larger story about a young country finding its place in the world. The result is a biography as ambitious as the paintings themselves.
Continue the story
Olana State Historic Site
📍Hudson, NY
Frederic Church didn’t just paint the Hudson Valley. He shaped it. At Olana, the Persian-inspired home and estate he designed and built above the river, Church treated the landscape itself as a canvas, directing views, planting trees, and engineering perspectives the way he composed a painting. Victoria Johnson’s biography is the first major life of Church in decades and the book Olana has long deserved. Reading it before you visit changes what you see when you get there.
Earlier selections
More selections coming next month.