ASHER BROWN DURAND (1796-1886)
Asher B. Durand was a close friend of Thomas Cole and painted in a similar realist style. While Cole was alive, Durand was considered second only to Cole in landscape painting. Following Cole’s death, Durand assumed leadership of the Hudson River School. There was a major difference between the two landscape painters. Rather than the allegorical idealism in many of Cole’s paintings, Durand depicted the beauty of nature with objective realism.
Asher Brown Durand was born on August 21, 1796 in a small town in Springfield Township, Essex County, New Jersey then known as Jefferson Village. His birthplace was later renamed Maplewood. The Durand family was of French Huguenot ancestry. His father, John Durand, who was a watchmaker and silversmith, was also an amateur painter and poet. His mother’s maiden name was Rachel Meyer. She was of Dutch ancestry. Asher B. Durand was the eighth child but not the last born in the large family. During his youth, Durand worked with his father in the silversmith and watch making business. When he was sixteen, a friend of his father admired his early drawings, many of which were rendered in the precise and delicate style of an engraving. The friend offered to use his influence to obtain an apprenticeship with an engraver for young Durand. The first contact made on Durand’s behalf was with Mr. W. S. Leney, an engraver in New York City. Impressed with young Durand’s ability, Leney proposed a financial arrangement that was far beyond what the Durand family could afford. Leney wanted one thousand dollars for the privilege of young Durand entering his etching establishment as an apprentice and all living expenses were to be paid by the boy’s parents. The friend did not abandon the effort, and within a few months obtained an apprenticeship for Durand with Peter Maverick, an engraver in the Newark, New Jersey area. Durand began his apprenticeship with the engraver in October 1812, at the age of seventeen.
After serving as an apprentice for five years, Durand became Maverick’s partner in 1817. The partnership continued until John Trumbull engaged the firm to produce an engraving of his painting, The Declaration of Independence. Trumbull insisted that Asher B. Durand produce the engraving. Durand accepted without consulting his partner, resulting in a dispute with Maverick concerning Durand’s independent commission of three thousand dollars to produce an engraving of Trumbull’s painting. It would take several years for Durand to complete the commission. During that period, the partnership with Peter Maverick was dissolved.
Durand established his own business with his brother, Cyrus and Charles C. Wright as his partners. They specialized in engraving banknotes but also made engravings of portraits and landscapes. The landscape engravings included copies of some paintings by Thomas Cole. Producing engraved copies of paintings by well-known artists required a great deal of skill and artistic ability. Colors in a painting were translated into the value tones of a black and white engraving, utilizing the fine line work of an etching.
On April 2, 1821, Durand married Lucy Baldwin of Bloomfield, New Jersey. The newlyweds moved into a house on Provost Street in New York. Their son, John Durand, was born on May 6, 1822. The following year, Durand entered a portrait of his child in the American Academy exhibition. Also, in 1823, Durand’s engraving of John Trumbull’s Declaration of Independence was published. It firmly established his reputation as an engraver.
Durand’s family increased with the birth of his first daughter, Eliza B. on July 13, 1824, and second daughter, Carolyn, December 13, 1825. Durand was actively involved at the November 8, 1825 meeting of artists for the purpose of organizing the New York Drawing Association, which, in 1826, became the National Academy of Design with Durand as one of the fifteen founders. His entries for the Academy exhibition that year included a portrait and a painting based on a religious theme, as well as three engravings.
During 1827, Durand built a new home on Amity Street in New York for his growing family. A third daughter, Lucy Maria, was born on February 27, 1829. A little more than a year later, on April 5, 1830, Durand’s wife, Lucy, died after a long illness. The following year, he terminated his ongoing participation with engraving firms and closed the house on Amity Street.
Durand became more interested in pursuing his artistic career as a portrait painter. In 1833, George P. Morris, editor of the New York Mirror, commissioned him to paint a portrait of former president, James Madison. In Durand’s depiction of the silver-haired Madison, the former president of the country is formally dressed in a black suit with a white vest and white shirt, tied with a bow, visible at the wide neck opening of his jacket. Madison, in the head and shoulders three-quarter view, wears a rather serious expression as he gazes outward toward the viewer. The background is nearly the same black color as his attire, with a slight soft glow outlining his face. His expression speaks of dignity. Durand also produced several more portraits that resulted in new commissions when they were exhibited at the National Academy of Design.
Early in 1834, Durand married his second wife, Mary Frank. That year he painted the double portrait entitled Portrait of the Artist’s Wife and Her Sister. The young women sit side-by-side on a low bank in a woodland setting near a large tree. Both women have sweet, quite pretty faces and shiny brown hair. The sister on the left wears an elbow length, puffed-sleeved, low-necked white gown. She has a pink sash at her waist and holds a wide-brimmed straw hat with a pink ribbon circling the crown, its ties looped over her arm. Her head is turned toward her sister who wears a black gown with a sheer white lace scarf draped across her shoulders. Her long puffed sleeves have lace cuffs. There is a burgundy shawl or robe across her lap and she holds a matching small red handbag at her side with the fingers of her left hand. Although their heads are turned toward each other, the sisters wear dreamy expressions as though both are lost in thought.
His career as an engraver having ended, in 1835 Durand began a series of portrait and genre paintings under the sponsorship of the well-known New York art patron, Luman Reed. Durand was encouraged by Reed to produce his own paintings rather than make engraved copies of paintings by other artists. At that time, Durand painted Portrait of Luman Reed, 1835. In the waist up, three-quarter view, Reed looks directly outward with large, dark brown eyes. There is a pleasant expression on his quite handsome face. His short dark, curly hair matches the color of his black suit. A white shirt shows as a triangle below the jacket’s high, rounded black collar. The points of the shirt’s high collar are visible on either side of Reed’s chin. The color scheme is limited to Reed’s black suit with white shirt, a muted olive green background and, visible behind one shoulder, the rounded top corner of his red upholstered chair shown just below center on the left edge of the canvas.
Luman Reed commissioned Durand to paint a portrait of President Andrew Jackson in 1835. Typical of that period, the portrait shows Jackson in a head and shoulders rendition against a dark background. In the painting, Jackson wears a dark suit and tie with his warm flesh tones and white shirt providing the only light color and value relief. Durand also received a commission to paint a portrait of Senator Henry Clay for Charles Augustus Davis. In the 1836 National Academy of Design exhibition, Durand displayed two paintings produced for Luman Reed. One was The Wrath of Peter Stuyvesant and the other, Peddler Displaying His Wares. The painting of the peddler is in the genre style. A family group surrounds the peddler who is seated near the center of the room. On the floor in front of him, a large green carrying bag is open, displaying stacks of colorful boxes. Several of the boxes have been opened on a low table, revealing their contents. One of the children in the composition stands near the peddler. She has red hair and wears a green dress. In her left hand she holds a string of beads that she is in the process of lifting from a box on the table. With her other hand she reaches up toward a man in a brown hat who is standing near her. The hat suggests the man has just entered the room. A pretty, dark-haired young woman, standing on the other side of the peddler, holds a length of gold fabric up against her red dress. The painting of the rather crowded room depicts the anticipation and excitement engendered by the peddler’s visit. When Luman Reed, the art patron who commissioned the painting, died on June 7, 1836, Durand was not left without a sponsor. Reed’s young partner, Jonathan Sturges, became Durand’s patron.
Durand was over forty when he stopped producing portraits to concentrate solely on landscape painting. In a letter to Thomas Cole, dated 1837, Durand communicated his interest in painting from nature. During June and July of the same year, Mr. and Mrs. Durand accompanied Thomas Cole and his wife on a sketching trip to Schroon Lake in the Adirondacks.
Under Cole’s influence, Durand joined in the summer excursions of the Hudson River area, producing drawings and painting oil sketches of views along the Hudson, in the Catskills and the Adirondacks. The following year, Durand exhibited nine landscape paintings in the National Academy of Design exhibition. He reopened the house on Amity Street, and during the month of September, took a sketching trip in the Hudson River Valley with fellow artist, John W. Casilear. The June and July sketching trip the next summer, was in the company of Thomas Cole. The following month, on August 23, 1839, Durand’s second son, Frederic, was born. At that time, Durand made changes to the Amity Street house that included the addition of a studio.
Financial assistance from his art patron, Jonathan Sturges, allowed Durand to make a one-year Grand Tour of Europe. Leaving his wife and children in America, Durand joined fellow artists John F. Kensett, John W. Casilear and Thomas P. Rossiter, who were traveling to Europe for the same purpose. The Grand Tour for artists included traveling to the art centers of Europe where they visited museums and galleries to view works of art painted by the old masters. It was a traditional way of studying the techniques of famous artists and thereby developing their own artistic skills. Durand was particularly impressed by the landscapes painted by the 16th Century French artist, Nicolas Poussin, the 17th Century French artist, Claude Lorrain, and the more contemporary 19th Century English artists, John Constable, who died in 1831, and Joseph Mallord William Turner, who lived until 1851, another decade following their Grand Tour European visit.
Durand and his friends set sail for Europe on June 1, 1840 aboard the steamer, British Queen. The crossing took just over two weeks, and they landed in England on July 17, where they remained for the rest of the month. On July 31, they sailed for the continent. Working their way south, they spent ten days in Paris, then went to the Lowlands for another ten days. They next traveled up the Rhine River and stayed in Germany for two weeks, followed by a month in Switzerland. By November 11, the artists had reached Florence, Italy.
Several months were spent in Italy, most of it in Rome. During that period, Durand painted the head and torso portrait of an older man with a white beard entitled, Head of a Roman, 1840. The painting communicates a great strength of character. The intense dark eyes give the man an almost fierce, unyielding expression, and yet the face inspires confidence in the judgment of the man. Behind the stern expression, there is a hint of tenderness and forgiveness. The portrait of the Roman captures the unique individuality of a man who appears to embody both physical and spiritual strength.
From Rome the artists went to southern Italy, at which point John Casilear departed from the group when they reached Naples. John Kensett also would remain longer in Europe. Durand returned to Rome to spend another two weeks in that art center before traveling up through northern Italy and on to Switzerland, then back to Paris on May 15. He reached England only a few days before he was scheduled to sail back to America on June 20, 1841. By early July, Durand was home in New York with his wife and family after being away for a year.
The ten paintings Durand entered in the 1842 National Academy exhibit were all based on the scenes he sketched while in Europe. By late summer, Durand was again tramping through the Hudson River Valley on an August and September sketching trip. He pronounced himself happy to be surrounded by the beauty of nature once more.
In 1845, Durand succeeded Samuel F.B. Morse as president of the National Academy of Design, an office he would hold until his resignation in 1861. Durand purchased a summer home in the Hudson River Valley near Newburgh in 1847. He continued to take summer sketching trips in the Catskills and Adirondacks through the 1840’s, often with Casilear and Kensett.
When Thomas Cole died in 1848, Durand assumed leadership of the group of artists referred to as the Hudson River School, and followed the example established by Cole. Durand and Cole had become close friends. Some of Durand’s work reflects the desire to idealize nature, a style made popular by Cole. During the year following Cole’s death, Durand painted Kindred Spirits, 1849, depicting Cole and the poet, William Cullen Bryant, standing on the edge of a cliff in a wilderness setting. The painting was commissioned by Cole’s and Durand’s art patron, Jonathan Sturges, as a gift to Bryant in appreciation of his funeral oration for Cole.
In Kindred Spirits the cliff ledge, on which Cole and Bryant stand, projects out over a rocky streambed. The source of the stream can be seen in the distance as a series of waterfalls. Water gushes around boulders, over rocks and into the center foreground. Thomas Cole, wearing a reddish-brown jacket, blue pants and a large-brimmed hat, holds a flat package under his left arm and, with his right, points a walking stick toward the distant hills. Bryant, who is dressed in a beige-colored suit, stands with hands folded on the head of a walking stick while holding his hat with the fingers of one hand.
The setting for Kindred Spirits captures the awe-inspiring beauty of the forest. The old friends stand in a spot of late afternoon sunshine that highlights their backs and casts long shadows in front of them across the rocky platform. While they stand there chatting, Cole seems to draw attention to some particular feature of the landscape with his walking stick. Details in the foreground are sharp, with different textures clearly delineated. Directly opposite them, on the other side of the stream, there is a blue-gray stone cliff face with its natural cracks and ridges. In the lower right corner of the composition, small evergreen trees are depicted with clearly defined needles on the branches. They grow next to a low flat rock. Broken tree branches, with splintered ends and coarse bark, fill the center foreground. From the lower left corner, four tall deciduous trees, with rough and splotchy bark, stretch from bottom to top of the left side of the painting. One long limb sweeps high over the men’s heads and on across the entire top of the painting from left to right. It forms a canopy above Cole and Bryant. The delicate, sharply defined small lacy leaves create a pattern against the blue sky. The surroundings form a natural oval-shaped frame that completely surrounds the figures of Cole and Bryant. Overlapping hills are painted as solid masses of soft green foliage that become successively less distinct as the hills recede. The outlines of the mountains, in the far distance, have blended with the clouds and are painted in soft gray-blue and lavender tones. Although relatively small in scale, the figures of Cole and Bryant are clearly detailed. The painting represents their special companionship. The poet, Bryant, had taken many strolls through the Catskills with Cole.
The artists in the Hudson River group continued their summer treks through the woods on sketching outings. Although their wanderings were most often in the area near Durand’s house at Catskill Clove, at times the group of artists joined Durand on his sketching jaunts to various other areas of the wooded hills and mountains. Durand wrote to Edward D. Nelson concerning one wilderness location where they planned to live for a period of time during which they could comfortably explore the wilderness area and sketch various scenes. Durand commented that they were settled in a cabin where they were surrounded by foothills, and had a clear view of Mt. Washington through the window. With streams in the valley, trees and rocks, there was a great deal to sketch and paint.
Whereas Cole sought to idealize nature, Durand’s natural inclination was to portray woodland scenes as he saw them with objectivity. However, he did not completely abandon the inspirational motif by then expected of the Hudson River School. Durand continued to produce some paintings within the established Hudson River style of ideal sentiment and allegory. One example is his painting, Imaginary Landscape: Scene from ‘Thanatopsies,” 1850. Near the center of the canvas, the towers of a castle can be seen rising above the top of a cliff overlooking a valley with a winding river. The pastoral scene is far more important in the composition than the castle, which is represented, in a small scale. Beyond the castle, an extremely high, sheer cliff face thrusts dramatically skyward. Through a hazy atmosphere, mountain peaks are softly delineated and merge with the clouds in the far distance. The foreground is clearly defined with crisp detail. In the lower right corner, a goat grazes near the base of a large tree. More goats or sheep can be seen on the gentle slope that carries down to the bank of the river where a man is busy working near the water’s edge. The realistically rendered foreground landscape and pastoral scene is a typical rural setting and could represent the period in time in which it was painted. However, the castle and soaring mountains create the mood of allegory more typical of paintings by Thomas Cole that symbolize the spiritual or lofty moral standards that are part of human existence.
Such allegorical paintings are not typical of Durand’s work. He is better known for paintings in which he represented nature with the sharp detail of reality. From 1850 on, Durand’s paintings reflect his emphasis on realistic observation. Under his leadership, paintings produced by the Hudson River School group took a more realistic than idealistic direction in the rendering of landscape scenes.
The painting, The Babbling Brook, 1851, is devoted exclusively to a pastoral scene. In the foreground, six cows graze or rest on the near side of a brook. The opposite bank of the stream is thick with trees. Farther along the bank, on the near side, another half-dozen cows graze. One can imagine the lowing of the cattle as heard by the man seen near the far group of cows. From the left foreground, the brook curves around a clump of large trees growing on the bank. Gurgling over rocks as it sweeps around the point, the brook disappears from sight, to reappear before it empties into a large, smooth-surfaced lake in the background. In the far distance, beyond the lake, a soft atmospheric haze clothes the trees and land forms.
Durand wrote about various aspects of painting from nature in his published, “Letters on Landscape Painting,” printed in The Crayon periodical during 1855 and 1856. In an article dated January 3, 1855, Durand declared that the American landscape artist had the right to develop an independent style based on what he sees in nature in his native country. In another article, dated March 7, 1855, he commented on atmospheric space, declaring that the changes in weather influenced the color as well as the presence of misty conditions
Durand’s second wife, Mary, died in 1857. He continued to live in New York City during the winters and devoted much of the summer months to sketching trips in wilderness areas. After spending fifty-two years as a resident of the city, Durand had a home and studio built on the family property at Maplewood, New Jersey, and moved there in April 1869.
Several years later, John Kensett and four other friends organized a surprise party in honor of Durand. The party was to be held in the wooded area near Durand’s home at Maplewood. Due to an unfortunate turn in the weather, the party was moved to the veranda of his home. Approximately twenty artists and old friends had made the trip to New Jersey from New York with food and champagne for the occasion. William Cullen Bryant was among the guests who gathered on June 8, 1872 to honor the seventy-five year old Durand.
In 1877, when Durand was in his early eighties, he made his final summer sketching excursion to the Adirondacks. From the drawings produced at that time, he created his last paintings. In Sunset-Souvenir of the Adirondacks, 1878, the soft glowing color in the sky, and its reflection on a large lake, fills most of the painting. The mirror-smooth surface of the water reflects both the sunset and the simple landmasses. The shore, in the foreground of the canvas, angles back toward several large trees silhouetted against the sky, and a peninsula juts out into the lake. Across the lake, the shapes grow increasingly vague as they recede into the distance. The farthest hills are indicated as ghostly forms seen against the sunset glow.
Asher B. Durand lived a long and productive life. He had continued to paint through the years, as he grew older. When he stopped making annual sketching trips in the Hudson River countryside and his favorite mountainous areas, he spent his final years living quietly in his home at Maplewood, New Jersey. There he died on September 17, 1886, at age ninety, and was buried in Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York.