His Early Days

Asher Brown Durand (1796-1886) was born on August 21, 1796, in Jefferson village New Jersey, US. He was a well-known American painter, engraver, and illustrator. He studied engraving with his father, who was a watchmaker and silversmith.

Durand received tutelage as an apprentice with the engraver Peter Maverick in Newark from 1812 to 1817. Later, Durand became Maverick’s associate and led the branch’s New York City branch until 1820.

Job as Engraver

Durand was also one of the founders of the Hudson River School of landscape painting. He established his reputation as an engraver with his engraving job on John Trumbull’s painting ‘Declaration of Independence (1786).

Durand continued to engrave reproductions during the next decade. He also illustrated gift books, annuals, and, mainly, engraved a popular series of 72 portraits of famous contemporary Americans.

Portraits of American Presidents

Durand formed a partnership with his brother, Cyrus Durand, and founded a banknote engraving company. His brother, Cyrus invented machines for the mechanical drawing of lines that revolutionised the art of currency engraving.

Meanwhile, Asher’s graphic work for the Federal Bureau of Printing and Engraving became influential in establishing the design tradition for US paper currency.

Durand spent most of his time after 1835 in portraiture and painting portraits of several US presidents and other prominent Americans.

His Journey to Europe

Durand’s new artistic career blossomed in and after his only journey abroad from April 1840 to June 1841. He visited Britain, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy.

Two aspiring painters accompanying Durand during his journey, who had started engraving and who would eventually become two of the famous painters, were the now-famous John Frederick Kensett and John William Casilear. Once in London, Durand and his disciples copied the old masters extensively.

A crucial turn in Durand’s career happened when an American expatriate showed them paintings and plien–air sketches by the late British master John Constable. Upon return from London, Durand seemed to take Constable’s naturalism to heart.

Well-known Painting ”Kindred Spirits”

Durand visited Europe in 1840-1841 to study the work of old masters. Upon his return from Europe, he started painting, out-of-doors, Romantic landscapes of the Hudson River area, the Adirondack Mountains and New England in a precise style.

‘Kindred Spirits’ (1849) is one of his best-known paintings in which he has painted two of his friends, painter Thomas Cole, who died in 1848, and poet William Cullen Bryant in the realistic Catskill forest settings.

In this landscape painting, Durand combined the geographical features in Kaaterskill Clove and a minuscule depiction of Kaarskill falls. Experts feel that the painting was not a literal depiction of American geography.

Rather, it was an idealized memory of Cole’s discovery of the region more than twenty years earlier. Alice Walton purchased Durand’s ‘Kindred Spirits‘ for a reported $35 million.

A Guiding Philosopher

Durand was one of the founders of the National Academy of Design (1826) and was its president from 1845 till 1861, until the beginning of the Civil War. He had also earned the reputation as the guiding philosopher of the second generation of New York landscape painters.

His ‘Letters on Landscape Painting‘ showed that he ardently promoted the practice of painting outdoors from humble natural objects as the route to learning and refining one’s art as opposed to learning from other art or artists’.

His Last Painting in 1879

Durand retired in 1869 to his native Maplewood. In 1872, he was feted by twenty of his former colleagues from the National Academy and his work continued to appear at prominent venues and expositions in Philadelphia.

Durand painted his last picture in about 1879, seven years before his death. Durand made a special mention about his famous painting ‘In the Woods’ (1855), in his “Letters on Landscape Painting“.

He wrote that “it is a fine picture which at once takes possession of you – draws you into it- you traverse it – breathe its atmosphere – feel its sunshine and you repose in its shade without thinking of its design or execution effect or color.”

‘The First Harvest in the Wilderness’ is another among the famous paintings of Durand.