Asher Brown Durand (August 21, 1796 – September 17, 1886) was an American
painter of the Hudson River School.
Asher Brown Durand (August 21, 1796 – September 17, 1886) was an American
painter of the Hudson River School.
Early life
Durand was born in and eventually died in Maplewood, New Jersey (then called
Jefferson Village), the eighth of eleven children; his father was a watchmaker
and a silversmith. He lived in what is now known as the Durand-Hedden house,
which is now designated as a historic landmark.
Durand was apprenticed to an engraver from 1812 to 1817, later entering into a
partnership the owner of the firm, who asked him to run the firm's New York
branch. He engraved Declaration of Independence for John Trumbull in 1823, which
established Durand's reputation as one of the country's finest engravers. Durand
helped organize the New York Drawing Association in 1825, which would become the
National Academy of Design; he would serve the organization as president from
1845 to 1861.
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, Adirondack, 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.
In 2007, the Brooklyn Museum exhibited nearly sixty of Durand's works in the
first monographic exhibition devoted to the painter in more than thirty-five
years. The show, entitled "Kindred Spirits: Asher B. Durand and the American
Landscape," was on view from March 30 to July 29, 2007.From Wikipedia, the free
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