1796-1886 Asher Brown Durand Galleries 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, Adirondacks, 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. Durand wrote, "Let [the artist] scrupulously accept whatever [nature] presents him until he shall, in a degree, have become intimate with her infinity...never let him profane her sacredness by a willful departure from truth." 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, "[T]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.  Related Paintings of Asher Brown Durand :. | Study from Nature Trees,Newburgh, | Cyrus Durand | Dance on the battery in the Presence of Peter Stuyvesant | Staubbach | Oberwesel on the Rhine |
Related Artists:
Jakob Emil Schindler
Austrian Impressionist Painter, 1842-1892
Oehme, Ernst Ferdinand
German, 1797-1855
Charles Schreyvogel
American Painter, 1861-1912,was a painter of Western subject matter in the days of the disappearing frontier. Schreyvogel was especially interested in military life. He spent most of his life as an impoverished artist. He suddenly became recognized and earned what seemed like overnight fame. He was born in New York City. He also spent much of his childhood in Hoboken, New Jersey. He grew up in a poor family of German immigrant shopkeepers on the Lower East Side of New York. Schreyvogel was unable to afford art classes and he taught himself to draw. In 1901, he was awarded the Thomas Clarke Prize at the annual exhibition of the National Academy of Design. Schreyvogel did much of his work in his studio (or its rooftop) in decidedly non-Western Hoboken.