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 | Guard House | Ex-President | Landscape | Kindred Spirits |
Related Artists:
Peter Adolf Hall
painted Self-portrait in before 1793(1793)
Jean-Germain Drouais
1763-1788 French Jean Germain Drouais Locations Son of Francois-Hubert Drouais. He trained first with his father and in 1778 enrolled at the Academie Royale, becoming a pupil of Nicolas-Guy Brenet. Around 1781 he entered Jacques-Louis David studio as one of his first pupils. The following year, though not officially entered for the competition, he painted that year Prix de Rome subject, the Return of the Prodigal Son (Paris, St Roch), presumably as a trial for his own edification. The picture has a friezelike composition and reveals both the influence of Jean-Francois Peyron and David as well as debts to Poussin and Italian 17th-century sources. In 1783 Drouais reached the Prix de Rome final with the Resurrection of the Son of the Widow of Nain (Le Mans, Mus. Tesse) but was eliminated from the competition in extraordinary circumstances: impatient to know his master opinion, Drouais cut a section off the canvas and smuggled it out of the competition rooms. David acknowledged it to be the best thing his favourite pupil had yet done, but by his hasty action Drouais had disqualified himself. However, the following year he won the prize, and great acclaim, with the Woman of Canaan at the Feet of Christ (Paris, Louvre), an extremely accomplished piece influenced by Poussin work and David Belisarius (Lille, Mus. B.-A.).
Heinrich Eduard Linde-Walther
1868-1939