Kindred Spirits
Kindred Spirits c1849 by American Painter & Gravador Asher Brown Durand (1796 – 1886) va formar part del Romanticism Art Movement i es va graduar a la Hudson River School. Asher’s main focus was on pintures de paisatges.
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.
Nota lateral: 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 impressió de tela enrotllada.
Informació a continuació de Wikipedia.org
Durand va néixer a i finalment va morir a Maplewood, Nova Jersey (llavors anomenat Jefferson Village). Era el vuitè d’onze fills. El pare de Durand era rellotger i argenter.
Durand va ser aprenent d'un gravador de 1812 a 1817 i més endavant va establir una associació amb el propietari de l'empresa, Charles Cushing Wright (1796–1854), que li va demanar que gestionés l’oficina de Nova York de l’empresa.
Va gravar la Declaració d'Independència per a John Trumbull durant 1823, que va establir la reputació de Durand com un dels millors gravadors del país.
Durand va ajudar a organitzar la New York Drawing Association durant 1825, que es convertiria en l'Acadèmia Nacional de Disseny; exerciria l'organització com a president de 1845 a 1861.
Els gravats d’Asher en bitllets de banc es van utilitzar com a retrats dels primers segells postals d’Amèrica, el 1847 sèrie. Juntament amb el seu germà Cyrus també va gravar alguns dels successius 1851 problemes.
El seu principal interès va passar del gravat a la pintura a l'oli 1830 amb l’ànim del seu patró, Luman Reed. Durant 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 [natura] 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, i com a regal a Bryant.