1796-1886 Asher Brown Durand Galleries 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.  Related Paintings of Asher Brown Durand :. | The Beeches | The First Harvest in the Wilderness | Naivete | The Catskills | The Edge of the Forest |
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Gilbert Charles Stuart
1755-1828 Gilbert Charles Stuart Locations Gilbert Charles Stuart (born Stewart) (December 3, 1755 ?C July 9, 1828) was an American painter from Rhode Island. Gilbert Stuart is widely considered to be one of America's foremost portraitists. His best known work, the unfinished portrait of George Washington that is sometimes referred to as The Athenaeum, was begun in 1796 and left incomplete at the time of Stuart's death in 1828. The image of George Washington featured in the painting has appeared on the United States one-dollar bill for over one century. Throughout his career, Gilbert Stuart produced portraits of over 1,000 people, including the first six Presidents of the United States. His work can be found today at art museums across the United States and the United Kingdom, most notably the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the National Portrait Gallery in London, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
Jean-Baptiste Van Mour
17th Century Painters of the Bosporus,was a Flemish-French painter, remembered for his detailed portrayal of life in the Ottoman Empire during the Tulip Era and the rule of Sultan Ahmed III. Van Mour was a native of Valenciennes, a Flemish town that at he time of his birth belonged to the Spanish Netherlands, but since 1678 to France. He studied art in the studio of Jacques-Albert Gerin, and his work attracted the attention of an aristocrat and statesman of the time, Marquis Charles de Ferriol. Van Mour was invited to go to Istanbul when De Ferriol was appointed there as the French Ambassador in 1699. De Ferriol commissioned van Mour to do one hundred portraits of the local people. In 1711 De Ferriol returned to France and van Mour worked for a variety of other diplomats. In the meantime De Ferriol published a series of one hundred engravings (after the paintings) in Recueil de cent estampes representant differentes nations du Levant. The book had a great influence in Western Europe and was published in at least five languages. Painting audiences with the Sultan became van Mour's speciality; he only had to change the setting and a few faces. Van Mour worked with assistants to fulfill all his obligations. In 1725 he was granted the extraordinary title of Peintre Ordinaire du Roy en Levant in recognition of both his and the Levant's importance to the French government. In 1727 the Dutch ambassador Cornelis Calkoen asked Van Mour to record his audience with Sultan Ahmed III on canvas. Van Mour was allowed to enter the palace during these ceremonies accompanying the ambassador and his retinue; therefore, he was familiar with the special protocol that prevailed in the Ottoman court for ambassador's receptions. Calkoen took many paintings of Jean-Baptiste van Mour with him, when he was appointed as ambassador in Dresden for the Dutch Republic. In his will of 1762 the bachelor Calkoen forbade his heirs to sell the paintings, which are now part of the Rijksmuseum collection.
George Elgar Hicks
1824-1914 British George Elgar Hicks Gallery Born on March 13, 1824 in Lymington, Hampshire, George Elgar Hicks was the second son of a wealthy magistrate. His parents encouraged Hicks to become a doctor and so Hicks studied medicine at University College from 1840-42. However, after three years "ardous and disagreeable study" Hicks decided he wanted to be an artist. Due to this, Hicks began training as an artist considerably later in life than most artists of the time. In 1843, Hicks attended Sass's Academy and by 1844 had entered the Royal Academy Schools. In 1847 Hicks married Maria Hariss and six of their eight children were born in the seven years following. He did not achieve much success as an artist during this period and later referred to his art at this time as "small and unimportant." He blamed this on the fact he had little time to study art or interact with other artists, due to his busy family life. In 1859, Hicks painted his first large genre painting, Dividend Day. Bank of England (exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1859) following the success of Frith's paintings Ramsgate Sands and Derby Day at the Royal Academy. It was a typical genre painting, showing a scene from the Bank of England and featuring a broad range of social classes. Hicks painted several more large modern life paintings in the following years which were generally poorly reviewed by critics. These include The General Post Office. One minute to 6 (1860), Billingsgate Fish Market (1861) and Changing Homes (1862). Hicks paintings were often of subjects that no other artists attempted, such as the General Post Office and Billingsgate Fish Market. Hicks was one of the few artists that showed lasting interest in the emulation of Frith's style and is generally considered Frith's principal imitator. By the late 1860s, the popularity of genre painting had waivered and Hicks began to focus on painting historical subjects, leading to society portraiture in the 1870s. In 1884, Hicks remarried following the death of Maria in 1881. He retired in the 1890s and died a month before the declaration of World War I in 1914.