Asher Brown Durand

Trained as an engraver — he produced the banknote engravings used by the early American republic and the definitive engraving of John Trumbull's Declaration of Independence — Durand turned to landscape painting in his late forties under the influence and encouragement of Thomas Cole. The conversion was complete and the results immediate: he became the Hudson River School's most influential theorist as well as one of its finest practitioners, and his 'Letters on Landscape Painting,' published in the journal The Crayon in 1855, set out the principles of direct observation and honest natural fidelity that the school as a whole endorsed. His mature paintings are distinguished by a close attention to the structure of individual trees — bark texture, branching pattern, the specific character of a particular species in a particular season — that no other American painter matched. Where Cole's landscapes made large moral arguments through dramatic sky and distant vistas, Durand's forest interiors linger in the near-distance, studying the light filtered through a canopy of oak or beech, the moss on a stone, the reflections in a forest pool. Kindred Spirits (1849), showing Cole and the poet William Cullen Bryant on a ledge above a Catskill gorge, was his most famous single canvas, painted as a memorial gift to Bryant after Cole's death. Durand was the longest-lived of all the major Hudson River School painters, dying at eighty-nine in 1886 having outlasted all his contemporaries. He served as president of the National Academy of Design from 1845 to 1861, and his institutional authority shaped the direction of American painting for a generation. His late work, produced into his seventies, shows no decline.