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Asher Durand [American Hudson River School Painter, 1796-1886]
Biography
Asher Durand was a U.S. painter of the Hudson River School. He was born in Maplewood, New Jersey (then called Jefferson Village), the eighth of eleven children; his father was a watchmaker and a silversmith.
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 Signing of the 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.
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 began to concentrate on landscape painting. He spent summers sketching in the Catskills, Adirondack, 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. (continued on the bottom)
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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, "The 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 for an American artist.
Asher Durand in Museums and Web Sites (Click on link to view image)
Butler Institute of American Art, Ohio
The Trysting Tree, 1868
Asher B. Durand at the Detroit Institute of Arts, Michigan
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
4 works by Asher Durand
Asher B. Durand at the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
5 works by Asher B. Durand
Albany Institute of History and Art, New York
An Old Man's Reminiscences
Arizona State University Art Museum
The Hunter, 1846
Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York City
(Undocumented Feature: In many cases the raw JPG image is much larger than displayed on the screen)
Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, Virginia
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas
A new museum scheduled to open in 2009
Kindred Spirits, 1849
Currier Gallery of Art, New Hampshire
A Reminiscence of the Catskill Clove, 1858
Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley College, Massachusetts
Catskill Meadows in Summer, 1861
Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, New York
Landscape
Maier Museum of Art at Randolph-Macon Woman's College, Virginia
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Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester, New York
Cows in the Valley, Watering
Genesee Oaks
Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey
Early Morning at Cold Spring, 1850
Museum of the City of New York
Dance on the Battery in the Presence of Peter Stuyvesant, 1838
National Academy of Design, New York City
The Evening of Life, 1840
Asher B. Durand in the Art Renewal Center
Asher B. Durand in the Artchive
Asher B. Durand in the Web Gallery of Art
Wikimedia Commons Image Database
California State University WorldImages Database
Ciudad de la Pintura (in Spanish)
The Athenaeum
45 works online by Durand