Who is asher durand

Quoted in David B. Asher B. Elias Magoon to Asher B. Durand, 4 February Lawall, Asher B. Bedell, Rebecca. Skip to main content. Rebecca Bedell. Charles Robert Leslie. Related Exhibitions. Kindred Spirits: Asher B. Durand and the American Landscape September 13, — January 6, Linda S. Ferber, vice president and director of the museum division of the New-York Historical Society, organized the exhibition; Eleanor Harvey, the museum's chief curator, is the coordinating curator in Washington.

Along with his brother Cyrus he also engraved some of the succeeding issues. His main interest changed from engraving to oil painting about with the encouragement of his patron, Luman Reed. During , he accompanied his friend Thomas Cole on a sketching expedition to Schroon Lake in the Adirondacks Mountains 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 remembered particularly 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 He expressed this sentiment and his general opinions on art in his essay "Letters on Landscape Painting" in The Crayon, a midth 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 This was painted as a tribute to Cole upon Cole's death during , and as a gift to Bryant. His Monument Mountain, Berkshires and numerous scenes done in the Catskills are remarkably fresh interpretations of the natural world.

In memory of his friend and fellow painter Thomas Cole, who died in , Durand painted Kindred Spirits, showing Cole and the poet William Cullen Bryant standing on a cliff overlooking a Catskill stream. If overliterary in content, the painting does show the close association between writers and painters during the American romantic period. Durand is discussed in Frederick A. Richardson, Painting in America All rights reserved.