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 :. | Portrait of the Artist-s Wife and her sister | Study from Nature,Stratton Notch,Vermont | The Sketcher | Study of a Rock | Study of Trees and Rocks,kaaterskill Clove |
Related Artists:
Wolfgang Heimbach
c.1600/1615-after 1678, German painter. The son of a bookkeeper at the corn exchange, he was known because of a disability as 'the Ovelg?nne mute'. An aristocratic sponsor, probably Graf Anton G?nther (1603-67) of Oldenburg, sent him to train in the Netherlands: stylistic considerations would suggest that this was in the 1630s. The Evening Scene (1637; ex-art market, Berlin; G?ttsche, no. 8) shows him adapting the style of Caravaggio as practised in Utrecht to the kind of social gathering depicted by Dirck Hals or Anthonie Palamedesz. He uses an artificial light source to exaggerate the modelling of the figures and the space. This characteristic of his art also shows in the Evening Banquet of 1640
William Ritschel
1864-1949 William Frederic Ritschel (1864-1949) was an impressionist painter who was born in Nuremberg, Germany on July 11, 1864. As a youth, he worked as a sailor and began sketching seascapes. He studied art under Karl Raupp (1837-1918) and Wilhelm von Kaulbach (1805-1874) at the Royal Academy in Munich before immigrating to New York City in 1895. In 1911, he settled in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California and began painting Monterey Peninsula. He died in Carmel in 1949. The Arizona State University Art Museum (Tempe, Arizona), the Art Institute of Chicago, the Crocker Art Museum (Monterey, California), the Davenport Museum of Art (Davenport, Iawa), Fisher Gallery (University of Southern California, Los Angeles), the Honolulu Academy of Arts, the Irvine Museum (Irvine, California), the Monterey Museum of Art (Monterey, California), the Museum of Art at Brigham Young University (Provo, Utah), the Newark Museum (Newark, New Jersey), the Oakland Museum of California (Oakland, California), the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (Philadelphia), the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, D. C.), Springville Museum of Art (Springville, Utah), and the University of Arizona Museum of Art (Tucson, Arizona) are among the public collections holding works by William Frederic Ritschel
Orsi, Lelio
Italian, approx. 1508-87 .Italian painter and draughtsman. A prominent Emilian artist of the mid-16th century, he was influenced by Correggio as well as by the late Mannerist style of Giulio Romano. His large-scale works seem to have been mainly secular decorations, notably illusionistic fa?ades, of which only fragments are extant. Their energy and expressiveness are apparent, however, in the surviving paintings of smaller dimensions. Orsi's sole documented architectural work is the Collegiata di S Stefano, Novellara