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 :. | Castle of Chillon | In the woods | Cyrus Durand | Study from Nature,Stratton Notch,Vermont | The Morning of Life |
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Maurice Utrillo
French Painter, 1883-1955,French painter, son of SUZANNE VALADON. He was entrusted to his grandmother while his mother posed as a model for such painters as Renoir and Puvis de Chavannes before discovering her own talent for drawing and painting. His father, the Spanish painter Miguel Utrillo (1862-1934), only admitted paternity eight years after Maurice's birth. Maurice Utrillo had no predisposition for art, but when he was 19 his mother took medical advice and urged him to adopt drawing and painting as a distraction from his need for alcohol. In search of a suitable subject, he went to the countryside around Montmagny, a village to the north of Paris, where, between the autumn of 1903 and the winter of 1904, he completed almost 150 paintings, sombre, heavily impasted landscapes, such as the Roofs of Montmagny (Paris, Pompidou). By 1906 the doctor felt that Utrillo could return to Montmartre. His pictures of the streets and suburbs were painted with a less heavy impasto and with lighter tones.
John Peter Russell
(16 June 1858 -22 April 1930) was an Australian impressionist painter. John Peter Russell was born at the Sydney suburb of Darlinghurst, the eldest of four children of John Russell, a Scottish engineer, his wife Charlotte Elizabeth, nee Nicholl, from London. J. P. Russell was a nephew of Sir Peter Nicol Russell. After his father's death J. P. Russell enrolled at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College, London, on 5 January 1881 and studied under Alphonse Legros for three years.Russell then went to Paris to study painting under Fernand Cormon. (His fellow students there included Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Émile Bernard.) Russell was a man of means and having married a beautiful Italian, Mariana Antoinetta Matiocco, he settled at Belle Île off the coast of Brittany, where he established an artists' colony. He would have 11 children with Matiocco, of whom six survived. John Peter Russell: Vincent van Gogh, 1886, Van Gogh Museum, AmsterdamRussell had met Vincent van Gogh in Paris and formed a friendship with him. Van Gogh spoke highly of Russell's work, and after his first summer in Arles in 1888 he sent twelve drawings of his paintings to Russell, to inform him about the progress of his work. Claude Monet often worked with Russell at Belle Île and influenced his style, though it has been said that Monet preferred some of Russell's Belle Île seascapes to his own.
Poray, Stanislaus
American, 1888-1948