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.
October 2026
Frederic Church: Global Artist
Edited by Tim Barringer, Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser, and Jennifer Raab (Yale University Press, in association with The Olana Partnership, 2026)
Frederic Church went looking for the world. He sketched volcanoes in South America, icebergs in the North Atlantic, and ancient landscapes in the Middle East, and those journeys shaped everything he painted. Published for the 200th anniversary of his birth, this collection of new essays sets Church inside the nineteenth-century world that made his travels possible, an age of industry, expansion, and empire. Scholars from across the humanities look at how his paintings engage with environmental loss, national identity, and the upheaval of slavery and civil war. It’s a fresh and sometimes challenging look at a painter many of us think we already know.
Continue the story
Olana State Historic Site
📍Hudson, NY
Church brought the world home with him. Olana, the house he and his wife Isabel built above the Hudson, holds Persian-inspired architecture, collections gathered abroad, and carefully composed views, and it reads like a record of everywhere he went. This book is the companion to Olana’s flagship bicentennial exhibition of the same name, which pairs drawings and oil sketches from his travels with the large showpiece paintings he made for public exhibition. The exhibition closes October 25, so this is the month to go.
Earlier selections
September 2026
The Coats of James Castle: A Plane of Singularity (Primitive, 2026)
August 2026
Ed Levine: The Embodied Experience of Art edited by Julie Reiss (Harpo Foundation and Marquand Books, 2026)
July 2026
Madoo: The Making of an American Garden by Alejandro Saralegui and Kendell Cronstrom (Timber Press, 2026)
June 2026
Glorious Country: How the Artist Frederic Church Brought the World to America and America to the World by Victoria Johnson (Scribner, 2026)
More selections coming next month.