Asher Brown Durand

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(b Springfield Township, NJ, 21 Aug 1796; d Maplewood, NJ, 17 Sept 1886). American painter and engraver. He played a leading role in formulating both the theory and practice of mid-19th-century American landscape painting and was a central member of the HUDSON RIVER SCHOOL. Five years older than Thomas Cole, he matured considerably later as an artist. After an apprenticeship (1812-17) with Peter Maverick, he began his career as an engraver, attaining eminence with plates after John Trumbull's Declaration of Independence (1820-23) and John Vanderlyn's Ariadne (1835), the latter so accomplished that the chronicler William Dunlap claimed it would win Durand immortality as an engraver. As with many contemporary artists, his training was based on drawing, an experience that influenced his insistence on the importance of outline and precise rendering.

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The American painter and engraver Asher Brown Durand (1796-1886) was a prominent figure in the first generation of the Hudson River school of painters.

Asher Durand was born on Aug. 21, 1796, in Jefferson Village, N.J., of a French Huguenot family. His first training was with his father, John Durand, a watchmaker. At 17 Asher was apprenticed to the engraver Peter Maverick and showed such facility that after 5 years they became partners. Durand also attended the American Academy of Fine Arts. When John Trumbull, who ran the academy, engaged Durand to engrave his painting The Declaration of Independence, Maverick, jealous of his former pupil, dissolved the partnership. Durand then set up his own establishment and was soon America's leading engraver. He engraved many portraits and book illustrations and executed a fine engraving of John Vanderlyn's Ariadne.

Although Durand had occasionally done some painting, he did not give up engraving in favor of painting until about 1834, when Luman Reed, a wealthy New York collector, commissioned him to do portraits of the early American presidents. In 1840 Durand traveled to Europe, where he admired the work of the 17th-century Dutch masters as well as Salvator Rosa and Claude Lorrain. Durand succeeded Samuel F. B. Morse as president of the National Academy of Design, New York, in 1846 and held the office until 1862, when he resigned.

Because Durand had been trained as an engraver, his earlier paintings are hard in texture and meticulous in detail, and his color is pale in tone. However, he soon developed a freer style and a richness of color. Two notable canvases, the Morning of Life and the Evening of Life, are allegories of the ages of man and depict imaginary landscapes in a rich and luxurious manner. But he was also a very factual painter. While most artists of the Hudson River school made sketches on the spot from which they worked up paintings in the studio, he was a pioneer in making actual paintings out of doors. As a result, his color is more true to nature than that used by his contemporaries. 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 1848, 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.

Further Reading

Durand is discussed in Frederick A. Sweet, The Hudson River School and the Early American Landscape Tradition (1945), and E. P. Richardson, Painting in America (1956). See also Oliver Larkin, Art and Life in America (1949; rev. ed. 1960).

Asher Brown Durand
Asher Brown Durand, circa 1869, by Abraham Bogardus
Born	August 21, 1796(1796-08-21) Maplewood, New Jersey
Died	September 17, 1886 (aged 90) Maplewood, New Jersey
Nationality	American
Field	Painting, Landscape art
Movement	Hudson River School

L to R.: Henry Kirke Brown, Henry Peters Gray and Asher Brown Durand, 1850

Kindred Spirits, 1849

Declaration of Independence (engraving), 1823

Portrait of Luman Reed, 1835

Asher Brown Durand (August 21, 1796 – September 17, 1886) was an American painter of the Hudson River School.

Contents 1 Early life 2 Painting career 3 See also 4 References 5 External links

Early life

Durand was born in and eventually died in Maplewood, New Jersey (then called Jefferson Village), the eighth of eleven children; his father was a watchmaker and a silversmith. He lived in what is now known as the Durand-Hedden House and Garden, which is now designated as a historic landmark.

Durand was apprenticed to an engraver from 1812 to 1817, later entering into a partnership the owner of the firm, who asked him to run the firm's New York branch. He engraved Declaration of Independence for John Trumbull in 1823, which established Durand's reputation as one of the country's finest engravers. Durand helped organize the New York Drawing Association in 1825, which would become the National Academy of Design; he would serve the organization as president from 1845 to 1861.

Painting career

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.

Another of Durand's famous painting is his 1853 Progress, commissioned by a railroad executive. The landscape depicts America's progress, from a state of nature (on the left, where Native Americans look on), towards the right, where there are roads, telegraph wires, a canal, warehouses, railroads, and steamboats.

In 2007, the Brooklyn Museum exhibited nearly sixty of Durand's works in the first monographic exhibition devoted to the painter in more than thirty-five years. The show, entitled "Kindred Spirits: Asher B. Durand and the American Landscape," was on view from March 30 to July 29, 2007.

See also

• List of Hudson River School artists

References

• Howat, John K. et al. American Paradise: The World of the Hudson River School, The Metropolitan Museum of Art: New York, 1987.
• Rosenbaum, Lee. "At the New York Public Library, It's Sell First, Raise Money Later," The Wall Street Journal, Tuesday, November 1, 2005.
• "An Old-Time Artist Dead," in The New York Times, September 20, 1886 [1]

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Asher Brown Durand

Wikisource has the text of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica article Durand, Asher Brown.

• Smithsonian Institution, Asher B. Durand Biography
• White Mountain paintings by Asher Brown Durand
• Biography of Asher Brown Durand on White Mountain Art & Artists
• Artcyclopedia: Paintings in Museums and Public Art Galleries
• Art Archive - Asher Brown Durand
• New York Historical Society - Lee A. Vedder, Luce Curatorial Fellow in American Art
• "Property and Progress: Antebellum Landscape Art and Property Law
• "The Durand-Hedden Family

v • d • e Hudson River School Movements: << Age of Enlightenment • Romanticism • Victorianism / Realism >> Artists: Thomas Cole • Asher Brown Durand • Frederic Edwin Church • John Frederick Kensett • Sanford Robinson Gifford • Albert Bierstadt Museums: Metropolitan Museum of Art • Wadsworth Atheneum • National Gallery of Art • New-York Historical Society • Westervelt Warner • Brooklyn Museum Locations: Catskill Mountain House • Kaaterskill Falls • North-South Lake • Olana • Thomas Cole House

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