Nature's "Kindred Spirits"

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ASHER B. DURAND (1796-1886) was a leading member of the New York art world who, with Thomas Cole, is credited with founding the U.S.'s first national school of art, the Hudson River School. This mid-19th-century art movement was responsible for idyllic depictions of both bits of nature and grand landscape views, making Durand's name synonymous with the development of American landscape painting. "Kindred Spirits: Asher B. Durand and the American Landscape" is the first monographic exhibition devoted to Durand's career in more than 35 years. It includes paintings of various areas in New York, including Kaaterskill Clove, as well as portraits of Pres. Andrew Jackson and Durand's landmark painting, "Kindred Spirits," which was in the news not long ago as a result of its record-breaking purchase from the New-York Historical Society by Alice Walton, heiress to the Wal-Mart fortune.

"Durand is a key figure in the development of our nation's art history," says Derrick R. Cartwright, executive director of the San Diego Museum of Art. "He belonged to a generation of artists who felt a special kinship to landscape. This comes across in the work that gives the exhibition its title ... and the entire body of work expresses quintessential ideals about environment, national character, and the wonders of untamed nature."

After working as an engraver for nearly a decade, Durand turned to painting portraits in the early 1830s. In 1837, he embarked on a trip to the Adirondacks with his close friend and mentor, Thomas Cole. Following this journey, Durand began to focus on landscape painting exclusively and brought a descriptively precise, yet poetic vision to his views of the countryside.

"Kindred Spirits" surveys more than 50 paintings, drawings, and engravings by Durand, while highlighting the various stages of his fruitful career, with extra emphasis given to the large-scale landscape paintings for which he is best remembered today. His multifaceted career spanned over 60 years, from the inception of a national cultural identity using scenery, through the rise of the Hudson River School.

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Durand lived a long and productive life--George Washington still resided at Mount Vernon when Durand was born in New Jersey. He established his preeminence with the execution of the engraving of John Trumbell's "The Declaration of Independence" at the tender age of 24. By 1829, he was set on a course of becoming a painter.

In the decade that followed, Durand's life proved quite tumultuous. Following the death of his brothers, his wife would fall ill and also die, leaving him a widower in ill health with three small children. Soon after his wife's death, Durand's mother passed away; then he was forced to evacuate New York due to a cholera epidemic.

In 1840, Durand set sail for a year's study in Europe. By this time, he had abandoned printmaking and was devoting himself fully as a landscape painter a field in which he had no formal training. Throughout this period, Durand maintained close and friendly relationships with Cole and the poet William Cullen Bryant.

Upon his return from Europe, Durand embraced plein-air techniques (plein air, a French word, literally translates as "open air," and is defined as painting or drawing done outside, in the open air; the equivalent term in Italian would be alfresco) and applied his European experiences to American subjects. His decision to become a landscape painter was influenced by his own commitment to leave the studio to sketch and study in the field. In letters from this time, he attests to his superior physical and spiritual health attained by contact with nature. It was in this time frame that Durand emerged as the leading landscape painter in the U.S., with parallels drawn between his work and Bryant's poetry: "What Bryant does with the pen, [Durand] effects with his pencil. Nature rises, as if from miraculous invocation, before you," wrote one admirer.

"Kindred Spirits," the painting that lends its name to the title of this exhibition, was started in 1848 as part of a commission of three works. The final painting of the commission, it was completed within a year of Cole's sudden death and features him and a hatless Bryant in a mountain landscape standing upon a large rock outcropping. In the foreground is a tree that bears the engraved names of Durand's two chose friends. The exhibition is a rare, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see this iconic work of art--among the most important American paintings of the 19th century.

"Kindred Spirits: Asher B. Durand and the American Landscape" is on view through April 27 at the San Diego Museum of Art.

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COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning