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Asher Brown Durand
Asher Brown Durand (1796 - 1886), was a U.S. painter of the
Hudson River School. He was born in and eventually died in
Maplewood, New Jersey, the eighth of eleven children; his father
was a watchmaker and a silversmith.
Durand was apprenticed to an engraver from 1812 to 1817, later
entering into a partnership the owner of the firm, who asked him to
run the firm's New York branch. He engraved Declaration of
Independence for John Trumbull in 1823, which established Durand's
reputation as one of the country's finest engravers. Durand helped
organize the New York Drawing Association in 1825, which would
become the National Academy of Design; he would serve the
organization as president from 1845 to 1861.
His interest shifted from engraving to oil painting around 1830
with the encouragement of his patron, Luman Reed. In 1837, he
accompanied his friend Thomas Cole on a sketching expedition to
Schroon Lake in the Adirondacks and soon after he began to
concentrate on landscape painting. He spent summers sketching in
the Catskills, Adirondack, and the White Mountains of New
Hampshire, making hundreds of drawings and oil sketches that were
later incorporated into finished academy pieces which helped to
define the Hudson River School.
Durand is particularly remembered for his detailed portrayals of
trees, rocks, and foliage. He was an advocate for drawing directly
from nature with as much realism as possible.
Like other Hudson River School artists, Durand also believed that
nature was an ineffable manifestation of God. He expressed this
sentiment and his general views on art in his "Letters on Landscape
Painting" in The Crayon, a mid-19th century New York art
periodical. Wrote Durand, "he true province of Landscape Art is the
representation of the work of God in the visible creation..."
Durand is noted for his 1849 painting Kindred Spirits which shows
fellow Hudson River School artist Thomas Cole and poet William
Cullen Bryant in a Catskills landscape. This was painted as a
tribute to Cole upon his death in 1848. The painting, donated by
Bryant's daughter Julia to the New York Public Library in 1904, was
sold by the library through Sotheby's at an auction in May 2005 to
Alice Walton for a purported $35 million. The sale was conducted as
a sealed, first bid auction, so the actual sales price is not
known. At $35 million, however, it would be a record price paid for
an American painting at the time.
In 1998, the United States Postal Service issued a set of 20
commemorative stamps entitled "
Four
Centuries of American Art", one of which featured Asher B.
Durand's "Kindred Spirits"
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