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 :. | Adirondacks | Beacon Hills on the Hudson River, | Ein Bach im Wald | Kindred Spirits | The Evening of Life |
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Adriaen Frans Boudewijns
Adriaan Frans Boudewyns, not Anton Frans (Bauduins, or Baudouin), (3 October 1644 - 3 December 1719) was a Flemish Baroque landscape painter. He was born at Brussels and learned to paint under a landscape painter named Ignatius van der Stock, and was received into the Guild there in 1665. He then travelled to Paris in 1666 and studied under A. F. van der Meulen for three years, and whose daughter Barbara he married 12 January 1670. In 1674 his wife died and in 1681 he moved back to Brussels where he married again. According to Houbraken he was a good landscape painter who encourage Gerard Hoet to stay in Brussels for 8 months in the 1680s. His son Frans Boudewijns (1682-1767) also became a successful painter. He was ruined in the bombardment of Brussels in 1695. Adriaen Fransz. Boudewijns, Adriaen Frans Boudewyns, Adriaen Frans Baudewijns, Adriaen Frans Baudewyns, Anton Frans Baudouin, Adriaen Frans Bauduins, Adrien François Bauduins, Monogrammist AFB
anthonis van dyck
Flemish painter and draughtsman, active also in Italy and England. He was the leading Flemish painter after Rubens in the first half of the 17th century and in the 18th century was often considered no less than his match. A number of van Dyck's studies in oil of characterful heads were included in Rubens's estate inventory in 1640, where they were distinguished neither in quality nor in purpose from those stocked by the older master. Although frustrated as a designer of tapestry and, with an almost solitary exception, as a deviser of palatial decoration, van Dyck succeeded brilliantly as an etcher. He was also skilled at organizing reproductive engravers in Antwerp to publish his works, in particular The Iconography (c. 1632-44), comprising scores of contemporary etched and engraved portraits, eventually numbering 100, by which election he revived the Renaissance tradition of promoting images of uomini illustri. His fame as a portrait painter in the cities of the southern Netherlands, as well as in London, Genoa, Rome and Palermo, has never been outshone; and from at least the early 18th century his full-length portraits were especially prized in Genoese, British and Flemish houses, where they were appreciated as much for their own sake as for the identities and families of the sitters.
John Pynas
1583-1631 Dutch John Pynas Gallery