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 :. | Kaaterskill Clove | Cyrus Durand | Hudson River Looking Toward the Catskill | Self-Portrait | The Catskills |
Related Artists:
Edmund Dorrell
1778-1857
Attributed to Wilkie
painted The Christmas Party 1850
Charles Codman
(circa 1800-1842) was a landscape painter of Portland, Maine. His art is featured at the Portland Museum of Art as mature, fine early American landscape painting. Codman was probably from Boston and was apprenticed to the ornamental painter, John Ritto Penniman. Codman began as a decorative painter and had no formal training but eventually produced mature works of romance and beauty. One of his more important commissions was to design and paint five fireboards (decorative panels placed over hearths during the summertime) in the landscape style, for the Portland mansion of shipbuilder James Deering. He also filled commissions for both portraiture and decorative arts.