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 :. | Luman Reed | Twoil | Landscape | Cows in a New Hampshire Landscape | Kindred Spirits |
Related Artists:
Lorenzo Lippi
1606-65 Italian painter and poet. He was trained by Matteo Rosselli, with whom he worked for many years in close partnership. His collaboration was sometimes anonymous but is documented from 1622, when they decorated the ceiling of the Sala della Stufa (Florence, Pitti), to 1631-2, when they worked together on lunettes portraying St Francis Adoring the Child and St Catherine in Prison (Florence, S Gaetano). In 1630 Lippi was enrolled in the Accademia del Disegno but appears not to have had his own workshop until after 1634, although he worked independently before then. The earliest paintings attributable to him are, both in facial types and in the soft, rich folds of the drapery, close in style to the work of Rosselli. Examples include canvases of the Apostles James, John and Matthew, and Christ Blessing (all 1628; Vaglia, S Pietro), and the Virgin Handing the Child to St Francis (1629; Florence, S Salvatore di Camaldoli). In the 1630s Lippi painted decorative and theatrical compositions, mainly on literary and biblical themes, which remained indebted to Rosselli, for example Samson and Delilah (1632; Stockholm, Nmus.) and the Virgin in Glory with Saints (1634; Ronta, nr Barberino di Mugello, S Michele). Shortly afterwards he produced works
George Benjamin Luks
(August 13, 1867-October 29, 1933) was an American realist artist and illustrator. His vigorously painted genre paintings of urban subjects are examples of the Ashcan school in American art. Luks was born in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, to Central European immigrants. His father was a physician and his mother was an amateur painter and musician.The Luks family (George, his parents and five siblings) eventually moved to Pottsville, in Southern Pennsylvania near the coal fields. In this setting, he learned at a young age the importance of compassion by watching how his parents helped the coal miners' families, and many believe that this is the reason why lower class New Yorkers were often Luks's subject matter. Luks studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts before he traveled though Europe where he attended several art schools. Later he went to Desseldorf where he lived with a distant relative, a retired lion-tamer. He abandoned Desseldorf for the more stimulating spheres of London and Paris. He then returned to Philadelphia in 1893 where he was an illustrator for the Philadelphia Press where he met John Sloan, William Glackens, and Everett Shinn. They would meet at the studio of Robert Henri, an artist who emphasized the depiction of ordinary life, shunning genteel subjects and painting quickly. The group became known as the "Philadelphia Five". In 1896, Luks moved to New York and began his art career there as the premier humorist artist for the New York World. During his time as an illustrator there, he lived with William Glackens.
Norman Garstin
(28 August 1847 ?C 22 June 1926) was an Irish artist associated with the Newlyn School of painters. He was born in Caherconlish, Co. Limerick, Ireland, and was involved in various professions such as journalism and gold mining in South Africa. In 1885 he befriended members of the Newlyn School and settled there a year later, moving to nearby Penzance in 1890. The Rain it Raineth Every Day 1889His work consisted primarily of small oil panels in the plein air style, something he had picked up from the French Impressionists such as Edouard Manet and Edgar Degas.