Asher B. Durand
A native school of landscape painting took several decades to take shape, and it was only in retrospect that it earned the moniker the Hudson River School. The phrase was not coined until the 1870s, and it was meant derogatorily, as a reference to dark, earth-tone canvases. At mid-century, Asher B. Durand (1796–1886) became the preeminent voice of American landscape painting. His musings were printed in a series of letters in the nation’s leading art journal the The Crayon in 1855. Durand believed in the benefits of cultivating a close relationship with the natural world. An established engraver before turning to painting, he preferred truthful depictions of nature developed from careful observation over the constructed allegories of his friend Thomas Cole. Through his art and teachings, Durand championed landscape painting and influenced the various approaches espoused by the second generation of artists.
Born to a family of farmers and artisans in Springfield, New Jersey, Durand began his artistic career as an engraver. He served as an apprentice in a New York engraving studio between 1812 and 1817. By 1820 his skill was finely honed, and he was chosen by John Trumbull to engrave his popular history painting The Declaration of Independence. By the 1830s, Durand turned to painting, initially doing portrait work. Luman Reed, a New York merchant and noted art patron commissioned a portrait of Andrew Jackson from Durand. The painting was so well received the young artist completely abandoned engraving in favor of painting.
Along with Samuel F. B. Morse and Thomas Cole, Durand was a founding member of the National Academy of Design in 1825, whose annual exhibitions provided a venue for emerging landscape painters. Durand’s admiration for Cole was made apparent by his painting Kindred Spirits, 1849, collection of Crystal Bridges Museum, which depicts Cole and William Cullen Bryant overlooking a Catskill landscape. Painted shortly after Cole’s death in 1848, the image illustrates the central importance of nature in the visual and literary arts of the nineteenth century.
Despite his reverence for Cole, Durand made significant departures from the overtly allegorical images of his mentor. As he gained prominence, Durand promoted new conventions of landscape marked by careful scrutiny of nature’s details, a style that emulated John Ruskin’s philosophies about intellectual development through observations of truth in nature. [1] One strategy was to create more personal compositions of the forest interior. By removing grand vistas, Durand was able to emphasize the tactility of nature through a more intimate environment conducive to the development of individual character. However, the reception of these paintings was lukewarm. As art historian Karen Georgi explains, “critics…made arguments about the pertinence, or irrelevance, of painting the minutia of the visible world. The ostensible point of this aesthetic debate…centered for all parties around the issue of whether a landscape painting should dwell on the particularities of the material world.” [2] Durand’s particular style of landscape was not embraced by period critics, and by the late 1860s he had retreated from the New York art world to his family homestead in New Jersey. When the end of his long life came in 1886, Durand, along with many of his colleagues, was all but forgotten.
Notes:
[1] Linda S. Ferber, Kindred Spirits: Asher B. Durand and the American Landscape (New York: Brooklyn Museum, 2007), 171.
[2] Karen L. Georgi, “Defining Landscape Painting in Nineteenth-Century American Critical Discourse. Or, Should Art ‘Deal in Wares the Age Has Need of’?” Oxford Art Journal 29, no. 2 (2006), 234.
