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Yaddo is an artists' community located on a 400-acre (1.6 km²) estate in Saratoga Springs, New York.

Its mission is "to nurture the creative process by providing an opportunity for artists to work without interruption in a supportive environment". It offers residencies to artists working in any of the following media: choreography, film, literature, musical composition, painting, performance art, photography, printmaking, sculpture, and video.

The estate was purchased in 1881 by Spencer Trask and his wife Katrina. The first mansion on the property burned down in 1893 and the Trasks then built the current house. Yaddo is an invented word, by one of the Trask children, meant to rhyme with shadow.

In 1900, upon the premature death of the Trasks' four children, Spencer Trask decided to turn the estate into an artist's retreat as a gift to his wife. He did this with the financial assistance of philanthropist George Foster Peabody. The first artists moved in in 1926. The success of Yaddo encouraged Spencer and Katrina to later donate land for a working women's retreat center as well known as Wiawaka Holiday House.

Yaddo has hosted more than 6,000 artists, including people like Truman Capote, Patricia Highsmith, Colm Tóibín, Sylvia Plath, Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Ted Hughes, and Katherine Anne Porter. An official complete list is now available here: [1].

Yaddo's gardens are modeled after the classical Italian gardens which the Trasks had visited in Europe. The 'Four Seasons' statues were acquired and installed in the garden in 1909. There are many statues and sculptures located within the estate, including a sundial which bears the inscription, "Hours fly, Flowers die, New days, New ways, Pass by, Love stays." While visitors are not admitted to the main mansion or artists' residencies, they may visit the gardens.

The Trasks also built "Trayaddo" in Tuxedo Park, New York in 1900. That stone and timber mansion would be sold in the early 1920's to fellow financier Alfred Lee Loomis who would make a portion of it the famed Loomis Laboratories where ground breaking scientific research was conducted covertly.

In honor of being next-door to the famed thoroughbred race track Saratoga Race Course there is held each August the "Yaddo Stakes" race on turf for female horses 3-yrs old and up.

In May 2005 vandals, using paintballs, damaged two of the 'Four Seasons' statues, the 'Poet's Bench,' a fountain and pathways with blue paint.

• Official website
• An Artists' Retreat Reaches Out
• Tuxedo Park property "Trayaddo" listed for sale in 2006
• The Saratogian May 18, 2005 "Vandals strike Yaddo gardens"

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