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 :. | Kindred Spirits | Notch House,White Mountains,New Hampshire | Landscape,Sunset | Cyrus Durand | Kaaterskill Clove |
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Robert Scott Lauder
Robert Scott Lauder (25 June 1803 - 21 April 1869) was a Scottish mid-Victorian artist who described himself as a "historical painter". He was one of the original members of the Royal Scottish Academy. Lauder was born at Silvermills, Edinburgh, on 25 June 1803, the third son of John Lauder of Silvermills (died 1838), Burgess of Edinburgh and proprietor of the tannery at Silvermills, by his wife Helen Tait (d.1850). After attending the Royal High School he went to London, where his eldest brother William was engaged in the family business. He returned to Edinburgh about 1826 and was elected one of the original members of the Royal Scottish Academy in 1830. On 9 September 1833 at St.Cuthberts in Edinburgh he married Isabella Ramsay Thomson and they then went abroad, accompanied by his younger artist-brother, James Eckford Lauder. Robert studied for some years in Rome, Florence, Bologna, Venice and Munich. Lauder returned to London in 1838 where he lived for several years, where his three children - Isabella, John, and Robert, were baptised at St.Thomases Church, Southwark, in 1840, 1841, and 1844. Whilst in London he exhibited at the Royal Academy and competed in the Westminster Hall competition of 1847, sending his Christ walking on the Sea, which was subsequently purchased by Lady Angela Burdett-Coutts, 1st Baroness Burdett-Coutts. He became the first president of the short-lived National Institution of Fine Arts and also exhibited there. He later removed back to Edinburgh in 1849 where both his sons - Robert Scott Lauder (born 1844), who became a physician, and John Thomson Lauder (1841-1865) - attended the Edinburgh Academy. Sir Walter Scott's novels provided him with subjects for many of his most successful historical paintings. About 1860 he suffered a paralytic stroke and did not practice after 1861. He died at Edinburgh from a bout of bronchitis on 21 April 1869, still paralysed. He is buried in Warriston Cemetery in Edinburgh.
Jose Malhoa
(Caldas da Rainha, 28 April 1855 ; Figueire dos Vinhos, 26 October 1933) was a Portuguese painter. Malhoa was, with Columbano Bordalo Pinheiro, the leading name in Portuguese naturalist painting, in the second half of the 19th century. He painted often popular scenes and subjects, like his two most famous paintings, "The Drunks" (1907) and "Fado" (1910). He always remained faithful to the naturalist style, but in some of is works, there are impressionist influences, like in his "Autumn" (1918), that can be considered as an "impressionist exercise". He saw at the end of his life, the inauguration of the Jose Malhoa Museum, in Caldas da Rainha.
John Rogers Herbert
English historical painter and portraitist . British, 1810-1890. was an English painter who is most notable as a precursor of Pre-Raphaelitism. Herbert was born in Maldon, Essex. In 1825, he moved to London to study at the Royal Academy. His early works were influenced by the troubadour style of Richard Parkes Bonington. Subjects showed the influence of Byron and exotic episodes of Venetian history. Haydee (1834) depicted the heroine of Byron's poem Don Juan. Herbert's first major success was The Appointed Hour (1835), depicting a melodramatic scene in which a Venetian man lies murdered at the place appointed for a tryst with his lover. The work became a popular engraving. Herbert followed it with other dramatic subjects such as A Prisoner of Condottieri Freed (1836) and Desdemona asks for Cassio (1838). After he was chosen to paint a portrait of Princess Victoria, before she became queen, he became a favourite portrait painter of the aristocracy. Around this time, he came under the influence of the architect William Payne, a convert to Catholicism. In 1840, Herbert also converted to the Catholic Church. He then painted mainly religious subjects in a style influenced by the artists of the Nazarene movement. Herbert was elected to membership of the Royal Academy in 1846. Herbert's paintings The First Introduction of Christianity into Great Britain (1842) and Our Saviour Subject to his Parents in Nazareth (1847) were the inspiration for the two most important early works of William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, founders of Pre-Raphaelitism. The two paintings, Hunt's A Converted British Family Sheltering a Christian Missionary and Millais' Christ in the House of His Parents were exhibited at the RA in 1850 to great controversy.