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 :. | Classic Italy | Fortschritt | Delaration of Independence | Landscape with Beech Tree | Kindred Spirits |
Related Artists:
Walter Richard Sickert
British Camden Town Group Painter, 1860-1942 British painter, printmaker, teacher and writer of German birth. Sickert was one of the most influential British artists of this century. He is often called a painter painter, appealing primarily to artists working in the figurative tradition; there are few British figurative painters of the 20th century whose development can be adequately discussed without reference to Sickert subject-matter or innovative techniques. He had a direct influence on the Camden Town Group and the Euston Road School, while his effect on Frank Auerbach, Howard Hodgkin and Francis Bacon was less tangible. Sickert active career as an artist lasted for nearly 60 years. His output was vast. He may be judged equally as the last of the Victorian painters and as a major precursor of significant international developments in later 20th-century art, especially in his photo-based paintings.
Francisco Pacheco
Spanish painter, teacher, and schola 1564-1644, Spanish painter and writer. He is not considered to be a great painter, but he is remembered for his theoretical work Arte de la pintura. The book is the most important contribution to Spanish artistic theory in the 17th century.
john D.rockefeller
new york metropolian museum, cloisters collection