Kindred Spirits
Kindred Spirits c1849 by American Painter & Engraver Asher Brown Durand (1796 – 1886) was part of the Romanticism Art Movement and was a graduate of the Hudson River School. Asher’s main focus was on landscape paintings.
Kindred Spirits depicts mutual friends American Painter Thomas Cole (1801 – 1848) with American Poet William Cullen Bryant (1794 – 1878) taking in the scenery of a gorge in the Catskills. The painting was commissioned from Asher Brown Durand (1796 – 1886) by the merchant-collector Jonathan Sturges (1802 – 1874); who gifted it to William Cullen Bryant in gratitude for the nature poet’s eulogy to Thomas Cole (Jonathan Sturges mentor), who died unexpectedly on February 11, 1848.
Side Note: If you look carefully you can see the names of Bryant and Cole carved into the tree.
This is a retouched digital art reproduction of a public domain image that is available for purchase online as a rolled canvas print.
Info Below From Wikipedia.org
Durand was born in and eventually died in Maplewood, New Jersey (then called Jefferson Village). He was the eighth of eleven children. Durand’s father was a watchmaker and a silversmith.
Durand was apprenticed to an engraver from 1812 to 1817 and later entered into a partnership with the owner of the company, Charles Cushing Wright (1796–1854), who asked him to manage the company’s New York office.
He engraved Declaration of Independence for John Trumbull during 1823, which established Durand’s reputation as one of the country’s finest engravers.
Durand helped organize the New York Drawing Association during 1825, which would become the National Academy of Design; he would serve the organization as president from 1845 to 1861.
Asher’s engravings on bank notes were used as the portraits for America’s first postage stamps, the 1847 series. Along with his brother Cyrus he also engraved some of the succeeding 1851 issues.
His main interest changed from engraving to oil painting about 1830 with the encouragement of his patron, Luman Reed. During 1837, he accompanied his friend Thomas Cole on a sketching expedition to Schroon Lake in the Adirondacks Mountains 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 remembered particularly 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 opinions on art in his essay “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 Mountains landscape. This was painted as a tribute to Cole upon Cole’s death during 1848, and as a gift to Bryant.
