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 Sketcher | Study from Nature,Bronxville | A Summer Afternoon | Dance of the Haymakers | Landscape with Beech Tree |
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Ambrosius Holbein
1494-1519 German Ambrosius Holbein Gallery Ambrosius Holbein (c. 1494 ?C c. 1519) was a German and Swiss artist in painting, drawing and printmaking. He was the elder brother, by about three years, of Hans Holbein the Younger and like his brother was born in Augsburg (which today is in Bavaria, but then was a free imperial city), a center of art, culture and trade at that time. His father Hans Holbein the Elder was a pioneer and leader in the transformation of German art from the Gothic to the Renaissance style. In his studio both his sons, Ambrosius and Hans, received their first painting lessons as well as the an introduction to the crafts of the goldsmith, jeweller and printmaker. Portrait of a Boy with Blond Hair, 1516, BaselIn 1515 Ambrosius lived in the Swiss town of Stein am Rhein, where he helped a Schaffhausen painter named Thomas Schmid with the murals in the main hall of the St George monastery. The next year saw Ambrosius, as well as his brother Hans, in Basel, where he initially worked as a journeyman in Hans Herbster??s studio. In 1517 he was enrolled in a register of the Basel painters' guild and in 1518 he was naturalized as a citizen there. The Portrait of a Boy with Blond Hair and its companion, the Portrait of a Boy with Brown Hair, are among Ambrosius?? best works of this period. Both are nowadays in the Basel Kunstmuseum. Ambrosius Holbein ranks among the most important of Basel??s illustrators and prominent „small formats?? artists.
LIEVENS, Jan
Dutch painter (b. 1607, Leiden, d. 1674, Amsterdam) Dutch painter, draughtsman and printmaker. His work has often suffered by comparison with that of Rembrandt, with whom he was closely associated from 1625 to 1631. Yet Lievens's early work is equal to that of Rembrandt, although in later years he turned more towards a somewhat facile rendering of the international Baroque style favoured by his noble patrons, thus never fully realizing his early promise. Nonetheless, he became a renowned portrait painter and draughtsman, and his drawings
Simon Vouet
b. 1590, Paris, d. 1649, Paris.French painter and draughtsman. Although at the time regarded as one of the leading French painters of the first half of the 17th century, he is now known more for his influence on French painting than for his actual oeuvre. He made his reputation in Italy, where he executed numerous portraits for aristocratic patrons and was commissioned for religious subjects. Although the early Italian works show the influence of Caravaggio, his work was subsequently modified by the Baroque style of such painters as Lanfranco and the influence of the Venetian use of light and colour.