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 :. | Oberwesel on the Rhine | The Beeches | Day of Rest | The Study,Windosor Park,England | Landscape |
Related Artists:
Callisto Piazza
(1500-1561) was an Italian painter. Callisto, a member of the Piazza family of painters, was born in Lodi, Lombardy. In 1523 he was working in Brescia. His first dated and signed work is from the following year, and shows a typical Brescian style. This style was then emerging, and included artists such as Romanino and Moretto. Piazza shows influences from contemporaries such as Dosso Dossi and Ludovico Mazzolino of the Ferrarese school, as well as Giovanni Agostino da Lodi. In 1526-1529 Piazza worked in Val Camonica, at Erbanno, Borno, Breno, Esine and Cividate Camuno. In 1529 he returned to his native Lodi where he formed a workshop with his brothers Cesare and Scipione (died 1552). In 1538, while in Crema, he married the noblewoman Francesca Confalonieri. Later Callisto moved to Milan, where he received numerous commissions, such as the decoration of the San Girolamo chapel in Santa Maria Presso San Celso (1542); the decoration of the refectory of the convent of Sant'Ambrogio (1545); the frescoes for the Saletta Negra in the Castello Sforzesco; and the decoration of the Simonetta chapel in San Maurizio al Monastero Maggiore (1555), largely executed with the assistance of his son Fulvio. He also worked in Lodi at the Incoronata (1454), Novara, at the Abbey of Chiaravalle and other areas of Lombardy.
Octavius Oakley
1800-1867 was a Victorian watercolourist. Oakley initially worked for a cloth manufacturer near Leeds in Yorkshire. He developed into a specialist of portraits in watercolour and enjoyed the patronage of the Duke of Devonshire. From living in Derby where he depicted rustic scenes, he moved to Leamington Spa in Warwickshire in 1836, but returned to London in the 1840s and worked there until his death, producing paintings of street scenes and gypsies and their lifestyle. His emphasis on gypsy paintings which he exhibited at the Royal Watercolour Society earned him the name 'Gypsy Oakley'. Oakley met Thomas Baker in Leamington Spa where Baker was living and working and in 1841
FERRETTI, Giovanni Domenico
Italian painter, Florentine school (1692-1747)