The American painter Frederic Edwin Church loved spectacle. His large-scale paintings of Niagara Falls, Mexican forests, Arctic icebergs and Maine mountains made him one of the best-known – and wealthiest – artists to come out of the Hudson River School founded by his teacher Thomas Cole. During three weeks in 1859, more than 12,000 New Yorkers saw the artist’s most acclaimed landscape, “The Heart of the Andes,” before it traveled to Britain for a two-year paid admission tour, and then returned to the United States for stops in eight more cities. Despite the fame during his lifetime, Church, who was born in Hartford, fell into obscurity after his death in 1900. In the past few decades, however, a few passionate art scholars and curators have reinstated the painter to his proper standing among other Hudson River School masters. Olana, the Persian-style castle he built on the Hudson River, is also considered a treasure as well as a National Historic Landmark and one of the grandest artistic residences in the country. The ornate house is as much a work of art as its collection of 700 artworks either by Church or collected by him over three decades. While the building undergoes construction this year, “Treasures from Olana: Landscapes by Frederic Edwin Church,” 18 of Church’s works from Olana, will travel to eight U.S. art museums, including the Portland Museum of Art, where it is now on view through Sept. 10. Most of the pieces in the show are small, among them several studies Church made of landscapes in Maine, where he owned a camp on Millinocket Lake in his later years. The centerpiece of the show, “El Khasne, Petra,” was one of Church’s favorites, a gift for his wife, Isabel, after they traveled with their young son Frederic Jr. in the Middle East, where they went, in part, to recover from the death of two older children from diphtheria. For a painter whose reputation was built on depicting sprawling vistas, “El Khasne,” the largest piece in this show, is unusual among his oeuvre. Painted in 1874, it expresses the era’s aesthetic fascination with exotic cultures and Church’s own infatuation with antiquities, but it is also cramped and ominous, as if foreshadowing the end of an idyllic view of America. Of all the pieces in the “Olana” show, it provides an opportunity to know both the artist and the era in which he thrived.

Two armed Bedouins guard the gateway to Petra, as if to defend the lost city. Figures were rare in Church’s work. Not only do they connect the viewer to an exotic world, they add a narrative element about antiquity, humanity and, as they lurk in shadows, possibly even fear.

Although Church traveled widely, he never forgot his grounding in the Hudson River School themes of lush waterways and bucolic landscapes. In “El Khasne,” the shimmering stream and brush are the smallest naturalistic component of the work, suggesting that a new imagery was soon to replace 19th century Romanticism.

Church devoted much of his career to painting expansive vistas of nature: Niagara Falls, the Arctic Circle, the coast of Maine, the Aurora Borealis. Here, dark “savage rocks” claustrophobically frame a man-made structure. Perhaps Church is subtly commenting on the cultural shift of his day: from Divine harmony to Darwinian science.

Petra’s soft “salmon” sandstone intoxicated Church. “You can smell the light,” one curator said about the artist’s work. Church uses the technique of luminism to poeticize the ancient treasury building as a touchstone of ancient civilization. It is a departure from his more naturalistic subjects of mountains, volcanoes, vast skies and jungles, all of which he saw as God’s handiwork.

Most of the pictures that hang in Olana are small. Measuring 5 feet high, “El Khasne” was designed to hang over the fireplace in a sitting room, perhaps recalling the painter’s vantage point at Petra: from his perch on a camel. The painting was a gift to his wife but also portrayed the unique regions that inspired the architecture of the villa.