Part 2: Durand’s America

(Part 2 of a series) Several of Durand’s colleagues, including Frederic Church, Sanford Gifford, and Jasper Cropsey, crossed oceans and continents in search of ever more exotic subjects to paint. By contrast, Durand believed that the best motifs could be found in one’s own country. “Go not abroad in search of material,” he wrote, “while the virgin charms of our native land have claims on your deepest affections.”3

John Durand remarked that his father enjoyed the wilderness regions in New York State and New Hampshire “before railways had penetrated to their recesses, where only a few scattered inhabitants could be found.” He recalled that his father spent all his leisure hours “devoted to painting from nature."

"He set his palette before leaving his house in the city and carried it, with a home-made easel and camp-stool, to his favorite sketching-ground...He was ever ready to rough it over corduroy, muddy, or sandy roads, in stage-coach and on buck-boards...whenever the colors or forms of rocks, trees, or mountains answered his search for the beautiful.”4

Best known for his painting Kindred Spirits, which portrays Thomas Cole and poet William Cullen Bryant standing together in a Catskill clove, Durand produced a body of landscapes ranging from mossy forest interiors to quiet streamscapes and pastoral farm scenes. Most scholars credit Durand and Cole equally as the cofounders of the Hudson River School, America’s first unique tradition of painting. 

After Cole’s death in 1848, Durand was acknowledged as the leader of the movement, serving for sixteen years as the president of the National Academy of Design, where he set aside a special room for the exhibition of nature studies. Durand’s work, including many of his so-called “transcripts from nature,” was the focus a major retrospective exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum a few years ago.

Linda Ferber, curator of the exhibit, has described Durand as “one of the earliest American painters to give up conventional compositional models based on European prototypes and to paint directly in response to what he actually saw in nature.”5

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3. Asher B. Durand, “Letters on Landscape Painting. Letter II,” Crayon 1, no. (10 January, 1855), 34.

4. John Durand, The Life and Times of A.M. Durand, (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1894. Reprint. New York: Kennedy Graphics, 1970.)183-84.

5. Linda Ferber and William Gerdts. The New Path: Ruskin and the American Pre-Raphaelites
. (New York: The Brooklyn Museum, 1985), 254. 

Books: The Painted Sketch: American Impressions From Nature 1830-1880

The American Landscapes of Asher B. Durand (1796-1886)

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