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 :. | Landscape with Birches | Verwandte Seelen | Landscape | Lake Scene in the Mountains | Hudson River Looking Toward the Catskill |
Related Artists:
Friedrich von Amerling
Austrian Academic Painter, 1803-1887,Austrian painter. He came from a family of craftsmen and studied (1815-24) at the Akademie der bildenden Kenste, Vienna, where one of his teachers was the conservative history painter Hubert Maurer (1738-1818). From 1824 to 1826 he attended the Academy in Prague, where he was taught by Josef Bergler. In 1827 and 1828 Amerling stayed in London, and he met the portrait painter Sir Thomas Lawrence, whose work was to be a strong influence on Amerling's painting during the next two decades. Amerling also travelled to Paris and Rome but was recalled to Vienna on an official commission to paint a life-size portrait of the emperor Francis I of Austria (Vienna, Ksthist. Mus.). With this work,
Lippo Memmi
active in Tuscany 1317-1347
Konrad Krzyzanowski
(1872-1922) was a Polish painter of powerful expressionist landscapes and vivid portraits, born in Kremenchuk in Ukraine. His art studies began in Kiev and were continued in St. Petersburg and Munich. In Warsaw he was a professor at the School of Fine Arts. He took his students for summer open - air sessions around Poland and to Lithuania and Finland. His seascapes were painted mostly in Finland. His works are mentioned briefly in a review of a show of "Independents" at the Royal Albert Hall, published in The New Age.Krzyżanowski died in Warsaw.