CLOSE TO ORIGINAL

Despite the small changes, the views remain astoundingly close to their roots. Seasons and shifts in daylight still provide the natural variables that so influenced Church's work. ''I can make more and better landscapes in this way than by tampering with canvas and paint in the studio,'' the artist once wrote.

To fully capture the natural landscapes, Church designed the windows of his house to frame the views, even going so far as to enhance many of them with elaborate, decorative borders -- mimicking the frame around a painting. Glories of the Hudson is also unique in the way the art is incorporated into the house. There are no stark, white walls with paintings hung solemnly in the center. Rather, the house has been maintained and restored to reflect what it would have looked like when Church and his family lived there, and the intricate borders on each wall have been repainted using the same stencils Church designed.

Church began building the estate in 1860, near where he'd painted and studied with mentor Thomas Cole. The house reflects the Moorish touches Church saw in Middle Eastern cities such as Beirut, Jerusalem and Damascus, thanks to architect Calvert Vaux, best known for co-designing New York City's Central Park.

Though his name is not always familiar today, Church once was considered a master whose exhibits drew huge crowds, and fans would line up to pay 25 cents just to see one of his paintings. His 1859 work, The Heart of the Andes, sold that year for $10,000, at the time the highest price ever paid for an American painting. It is now at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. And Church's Twilight in the Tropics sold late last month for more than $1.2 million at a New York City fine art auction.

Most of Church's works sold during his lifetime. In later years, he had to purchase some of them back for display at Olana -- his gem, his own little ``center of the world.''

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