Asher Brown Durand

(1796-1886)

Landscape 18 1/8 x 30 1/8 in. (46 x 76.5 cm.)

Footnotes

Provenance
M. Knoedler & Co., Inc., New York.
Paul Cushman, Sr. (1891-1971), New York, acquired from the above.
By descent from the above to the late owner, 1971.

Around 1835, inspired by Thomas Cole and with the patronage of the prominent New York merchant and art patron Luman Reed (1785-1836), Asher B. Durand ended a successful career as an engraver to dedicate himself to painting full time. In 1837 he accompanied Cole on a sketching trip to the Schroon Lake region in the Adirondacks, which led to Durand completing nine landscapes; these were exhibited at the annual National Academy of Design exhibition the same year. In 1838 and 1839, he again made summer sketching trips and contributed landscapes to subsequent Academy exhibitions.

In the summer of 1840 Durand joined fellow artists John F. Kensett (1816-1872), John W. Casilear (1811-1893), and Thomas P. Rossiter (1818-1871) in Europe, where he studied the works of the Old Masters, especially Claude Lorraine (1600-1682). After his return to New York in July 1841 he exhibited paintings of European scenery, but he soon resumed summer sketching tours in the Catskills and the Hudson River Valley. In 1845, Durand was named president of the National Academy, a position he would hold until 1861. He increasingly believed that direct study of nature should be the primary inspiration for American artists and began producing meticulously painted works that were admired for their faithful depictions of natural forms, light and atmosphere. Such works also expressed sentiments similar to those in the poetry of his friend William Cullen Bryant. Several of his paintings of the 1850s were directly inspired by Bryant's poems.

In 1847, a critic for the New York Evening Post discussed Asher B. Durand's work alongside fellow Hudson River School master Thomas Cole, praising, "It is now generally conceded, we believe, that Cole and Durand are the two most prominent landscape painters in this country. They are indeed artists of superior ability and will undoubtedly hereafter be looked upon as the founders of two American schools. Each one is distinguished for peculiar excellencies...Cole has a passion for the wild and tempestuous; Durand is a lover of the cultivated country when glowing in mellow sunlight." (L.S. Ferber, Kindred Spirits: Asher B. Durand and the American Landscape, exhibition catalogue, New York, 2007, p. 161)

Following Cole's death in 1848, Durand solidified a leading role in the American landscape school and exerted considerable influence on many younger painters. His Kindred Spirits of 1849 (Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art), painted in memory of Cole, almost immediately became one of the best-known paintings in the country and continues to be one of the top examples of early American landscape painting to this day.

During the 1860s Durand continued to sketch in the summers and paint in New York during the winters. As the ever-increasing pressures of the Industrial Revolution came to bare, Americans sought refuge in the tranquility of pastoral scenes such as Durand's Landscape. The glorification of nature was never more important to a society struggling with the rapid expansion of their country. Here he uses a softness in his brushwork, much like the paintings of Claude Lorraine, to emphasize the solitude of the scene. Oswaldo R. Roque wrote, "The effect of the success of Durand's style was to push American landscape painting further toward nature and away from man. His broader attitude to what was picture-worthy in nature and his assertion that attentiveness to nature's details was the only way of arriving at the truth were of vast import. His approach, of course, was productive of a realism that in subsequent years was taken to be his major contribution to the Hudson River School." (American Paradise: The World of the Hudson River School, New York, 1987, p. 37)