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 :. | A Summer Afternoon | Classic Italy | Strawberrying | View of the Shandaken Mountains | The Beeches |
Related Artists:
Jewett, William Smith
American, 1792-1874
Jan Wyck
Dutch Baroque Era Painter, 1652-1700,Son of Thomas Wijck. A marriage certificate issued on 22 November 1676 describes the artist as 'Jan Wick of St Paul's Covent Garden, gent., widower, about 31 ...', suggesting that he was born c. 1645, but his correct birthdate is known from the inscription on a mezzotint portrait of him by John Faber II (1684-1756) after a painting by Sir Godfrey Kneller. Jan is first documented on 17 June 1674, when he appeared before the court of the Painter-Stainers' Company in London and vowed to pay both his own and his father's quarterly fees. The certificate of 1676 relates to his second marriage, to Ann Skinner (d 1687), who between 1678 and 1683 bore him four children, all of whom died young. After Ann's death in 1687, he married Elizabeth Holomberg (d 1693) in 1688 and moved to Mortlake. Between 1689 and 1693 they had two sons and a daughter.
Knut Ekwall
was a Swedish painter, 3 April 1843 in Säby (Småland province), Sweden - 4 April 1912 in Säby. Ekwall studied from 1860-1866 at the Academy of Arts in Stockholm, with emphasis on xylography (designing woodcut printing blocks) and drawing. He became a pupil of the painter Ludwig Knaus in Berlin. In 1870, Ekwall established himself as an artist in Munich in Germany and later worked in Leipzig. His works during this period were primarily for magazine illustrations, and were reproduced as engravings. He returned to Sweden and died there at the age of 69.