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 :. | The Study,Windosor Park,England | On Schroom river looking Northwest | Study from Nature,Bronxville | Landscape | Summer Afternoon |
Related Artists:
Nicola Russo
painted apparizione di san Michele in 1690
Paul Emmert
Paul Emmert (1826-1867) , who is also known as Paul Emert, was an artist born near Berne, Switzerland in 1826. By 1845, he had become an established artist in New York. He joined the gold rush to California in 1849. The following year he exhibited in Brooklyn a panorama of the gold mining activities before making his second trip to California late in 1850. While in California, he operated the Bear Hotel in Sacramento and exhibited the panorama in San Francisco and other communities. In 1853 he moved to Hawaii where he resided until his death in 1867 in Honolulu.
Mount, Shepard Alonzo
American Painter, 1804-1868