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 :. | Hudson River Looking Toward the Catskill | Kaaterskill Clove | Study of a Rock | Dance on the battery in the Presence of Peter Stuyvesant | Springfield Township |
Related Artists:
Michiel Coxie
Coxie also spelled Coxcie or Coxien, Latinised name Coxius (1499 - 3 March 1592) was a Flemish painter who studied under Bernard van Orley, who probably induced him to visit the Italian peninsula. Coxie was born in 1499 in Mechelen in what was then the Duchy of Brabant. At Rome in 1532 he painted the chapel of Cardinal Enckenvoirt in the church of Santa Maria dell'Anima; and Giorgio Vasari, who knew him, says with truth that he fairly acquired the manner of an Italian. But Coxie's principal occupation was designing for engravers; and the fable of Psyche in thirty-two sheets by Agostino Veneziano and the Master of the Die are favorable specimens of his skill. Returning to the Netherlands, Coxie greatly extended his practice in this branch of art. But his productions were till lately concealed under an interlaced monogram M.C.O.K.X.I.N. In 1539, Coxie returned to Mechelen, where he matriculated and painted the wings of an altarpiece for the chapel of the guild of St Luke. The centre of this altar-piece, by Jan Mabuse, represents Saint Luke the Evangelist, patron of painters, portraying the Virgin; the side pieces contain the Martyrdom of Saint Vitus and the Vision of St John the Evangelist in Patmos. At van Orley's death in 1541 Coxie succeeded to the office of court painter to the Regent Maria of Austria, for whom he decorated the castle of Binche. He was subsequently patronized by Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, who often coupled his works with those of Titian; by Philip II of Spain, who paid him royally for a copy of Jan van Eyck's Agnus Dei, and also commissioned two copies of Van der Weyden's Descent from the Cross from Coxie; and by Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, Duke of Alva, who once protected him from the insults of Spanish soldiery at Mechelen. At that time, Coxie also designed tapestries for the Brussels manufacturers.
James Earle Fraser
American Sculptor, 1876-1953,American sculptor, b. Winona, Minn., studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and in Paris. The best known of his many works are The End of the Trail (Visalia, Calif.), the designs for the Indian head nickel, and a statue of Alexander Hamilton
ivan generalic
Ivan Generalic (December 21, 1914--November 27, 1992) was a Croatian naive art painter. Generalic was born in Hlebine near Koprivnica. In elementary school, painting lessons were his greatest joy and as a child he used to earn money. He mostly drew with pencil on paper bags and some of these sketches were seen by Krsto Hegedusic, at the time (1930) just a student of the art academy, later a professor. Hegedusic was impressed with Generalic's work and organized Generalic's first public art exhibition, held in 1931 in the Zagreb Art pavilion. Positive critiques and contacts at the time led to a new era of not only Croatian, but also world art as well. After World War II, in 1945 he became a member of ULUH (society of Croatian artists). In 1953 he exhibited in Paris, where he lived and painted for a few months. In 1959 he painted The Deer Wedding - his most valuable work, according to followers of the Croatian naïve art world.