Asher B. Durand and the American Landscape - Essay Example

ASHER B DURAND Asher Brown Durand (August 21, 1796-September 17, 1886) was an American painter of Hudson River School. He was born at Jefferson Village which is now known as Maplewood, New Jersey. He was the eighth child of the eleven children of his father who was a watchmaker and a silversmith. Durand died at the age of 90 years, an exceptional expanse of time in an era when the life expectancy was limited to 45 to 50 years in America. Durand was an accomplished etcher before he turned his attention to painting. He was the acknowledged dean of the American landscape school from his election as president of The National Academy of Design in 1845, until his death. During these forty years, he set the tone for American landscape painting, which celebrated man’s relationship with nature and the wilderness it encompasses within. He helped to define an American sensibility about the land, setting it apart from European traditions. Durand’s influence hastened the decline of history painting in the mid 19th century and the rise in popularity of landscape paintings, which were increasingly considered great works of art. Durand was influenced by the British critic John Ruskin and advocated a naturalistic approach to landscape. At the age of 16, in the year 1817, Durand became a trainee to Peter Maverick, a well established artist of those times. In the middle decade of the 19th Century, landscape painting dominated the American art. Beginning with Thomas Cole, an English born artist with an amazing love for wilderness, two generations of landscape painters consciously set out to create the first American art movement. Based in New York City they became to be collectively known as The Hudson River School. The founder members were Cole, Thomas Doughty and Asher B. Durand. These artists embraced landscape paintings as a medium of addressing profound philosophical questions of life and human aspiration. The members of this school imagined the natural world as a grand opera. With or without actors the scenery provided all the romance and the drama; lofty mountains, turbulent skies and divinely inspired sunlight. Durand was heavily influenced by Thomas Cole and after his death in 1848, became the leader of the American School of Landscape Painting. Durand initiated his career as an engraver which lasted from 1812 to 1817 and later established a partnership with the owner of the company. By the early 1830’s he got a name as the best engraver in the country. Initially he began with engraving bank notes and other commercial works but soon after he got engrossed into admirable fine-arts engravings. His interest shifted a little before 1835 and Durand got more fascinated by painting and thought of it as a challenging medium. According to Robert L. Pincus, an art critic, “Try as you might, you won’t find a painter who loved nature more than Asher Durand.” (Pincus 2008). The painter’s most legendary work is devoid of a doubt, “Kindred Spirits”. It was sold by the New York Public Library to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas, bankrolled by Alice Walton. It was a sealed auction, and the actual price paid remains unknown but it is estimated to have reached somewhere near $35 million, which was a record price paid at that time for an American art. It made headlines and rippled a controversy which continues to remain so. Many are of the belief that what happened was wrong and the painting should have stayed at the Durand’s home for much of his adult life. This painting may not be his paramount art work, but it is one of the icons of American art. Lumen Reed, a successful grocery wholesaler, facilitated Durand’s work by ordering a set of painted portraits of the first seven presidents of America from him. Reed was a new breed of merchant-patrons, who provided the much needed support to the American painters while they were in the formative years of forming an American school independent of Europe. Durand’s previous experience as an engraver helped him to obtain his name in the art world. With the precision of an engraver and taking landscape painting in its naturalistic style, he quickly rose to the fore with works such as the ‘The Breeches’. Durand’s pictures had two key components – glorification of nature and nationalistic pride, and when he would paint a fantasy he would focus his imagination on these two apparatus. He painted a portrait of Lumen Reed in 1835. Durand rendered trees and mountains as signs of the divine. He was a mix of the idealist and a pragmatist. His landscapes speak in detail about his vision and ambition, which kept his energies occupied from 1837 onwards. He believed in the redemptive powers of the nature. Several months every year were spent by him on traveling in order to observe and commune with the land in the Adirondack Mountains and in New York England. Recently rediscovered diaries by the artist from the 1830’s, focus on Sunday sketching trips to Hoboken. As is known, Durand was a native of New Jersey and used to commute to New York City via the Hoboken and Jersey City ferries. Durand’s annual summer trips yielded him hundreds of drawings and sketches that he finally incorporated in his finished academy pieces. These are the quintessence of his Hudson River School technique. The Hudson River School was the first truly American school of painting that was formed of a group of painters active in the 19th century New York. Amongst the other of the group was Asher B. Durand who formed truth-seeking and aesthetically robust landscape scenes of young America and beyond it. It was a time when America was grappling with issues of national identity. His paintings celebrate what was uniquely American and show a country attempting to mark an identity of its own, distinguished from Europe. He was primarily aware that portraiture was not the prime genre in the America of the day nor did it bring as much respect and regard in the artistic circles as landscape painting. He painted big panoramic pictures that carried a message each. His paintings are sublime powerful visions of the American landscape that binds within them the ideology and beliefs that helped the nation during its formative years and shaped its future. Asher Brown Durand’s landscape titled A View towards the Hudson Valley of the year 1851 helped create a national identity for the young America which was much strived for. The exquisiteness of its natural panorama is emblematic both of America’s history and future potential. The extent and range of this landscape and the awe-inspiring supremacy of the pure untouched nature encompasses and enthuses a pious reverence. The painters of the Hudson River School were also inspired by the writers of those times like Henry David Thoreau and James Fennimore Cooper, to name a few. Henry David Thoreau has said, “This world is but canvas to our imaginations.” (Thoreau 2004). The paintings of that period seem to be celebrating the novelties of the nature unique to a nation of untouched forests, soaring mountain peaks, murky beaches and grand waterfalls. Those paintings embrace the transcendent vistas of the American landscape. They also offer a peek into another phenomenon that attained popularity in the 19th Century which was – travel. With the rise in the travel and Tourism, the Hudson River School incorporated paintings of foreign locations to their collection of American images which included the magnificent scenes from South America, Caribbean and Europe. Yet, in all the paintings there is an awesome dominance of nature. The widely traveled groups of artists were active for nearly half a century. Their renditions span the continental United States featuring Niagara Falls, Yosemite and the Hudson River from which they take their collective name. Many of the best known American painters were in this group. Apart from these Durand’s nature is fundamental to his paintings. Asher B Durand was renowned for his many scenic views of the Hudson River Valley and the Catskills which was the quintessential symbol of American wilderness for much of the nineteenth century. The area was subsequently immortalized in the art of Durand and other preeminent landscape artists. His work, A View towards the Hudson Valley is momentous in scope. The two figures in the painting look out into a cultivated valley while one gestures expansively to the stretch of land below. The painting shows the domination of man over the natural landscape and imparts a feeling of confidence and optimism about progress. The setting which the artist has painted is not solely of his imagination but is a place called Kaaterskills Clove which is a distinctive abyss known as the heart of the Catskills. It was an attractive and most visited tourist destination and most painted by the students of the Hudson River School artists. The sunrise of the location was extremely popular and thousands of seasonal visitors who came every year rose early for the daily ritual of viewing the sunrise. It is perhaps the most famous representation of the Catskill landscape. A view up a deep clove toward a cataract that may or may not be a Kaaterskills Fall, the painting is actually a composition combining many of the characteristic geographical and natural features of the Catskill landscape. The fore-ground ledge may have been based on a rock formation known as Church’s ledge. The waterfall can be molded on Fawn’s Leap, a smaller waterfall on the south side of Kaaterskills Clove. With this rocky gorge, Durand has depicted his recently deceased friend and mentor Thomas Cole. The two figures look as if engaged in an earnest discussion with his friend, the poet William Cullen Bryant. It is known that both the men were fervent admirers of the natural wonders of the region. View towards the Hudson Valley, with two gentlemen walkers admiring a rustic valley, captures the equipoise between men and nature that man and nature never seem able to maintain. The paintings of the Hudson River School influenced and continue to do so about how Americans see and think about nature. It does not sell its audience just pictures of America but the idea of a new land. Durand’s progressive attitude lent a modern sensibility to his work. According to the chief curator of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Eleanor Jones Harvey, “Durand captured the sublime grandeur of the American landscape at a time when national identity was tied to depictions of these regions. Both his vibrant painted sketches and his polished studio paintings embody the American search for self knowledge and our restless exploration of the land.” (Kindred spirits: Asher B. Durand and the American landscape. 2007; Craven 2003, 204; Asher B Durand: 1796-1886; The Hudson River school: Then and now; Stenz 2007; Hudson’s Hawkers. 2003; Nature and the nation. 2005). Bibliography Asher B Durand: 1796-1886. http://www.artchive.com/artchive/D/durand.html. Craven, Wayne. 2003. Asher B. Durband: Kindred Spirits and Progress. http://books.google.com/books?id=MO5SJdnJnBMC&pg=PA204&lpg=PA204&dq=asher+b+durand+progress&source=web&ots=4pgsc3T8CI&sig=TKDGuDhbjFJIZhsKShqRTxuG-3Y&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=6&ct=result. Hudson’s Hawkers. 2003. Metro Active. http://www.metroactive.com/papers/metro/10.16.03/bierstadt-0342.html. Kindred spirits: Asher B. Durand and the American landscape. 2007. Arizona Nonprofit corporation. http://www.tfaoi.com/aa/7aa/7aa819.htm. Nature and the nation. 2005. International Art Treasure: Web Magazine. http://www.iatwm.com/200507/NatureandtheNationHudsonRiverSchool/. Pincus, Robert L. 2008. Kindred spirits a tribute to Asher B. Durand and his passion for nature. Sign on San Diego.com. http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20080210/news_1a10sdma.html. Stenz, Margaret. 2007. Following in the footsteps of Asher B Durand: A walker’s guide. http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/kindred_spirits/uploads/Durand_resources.pdf. The Hudson River school: Then and now. http://hamiltonauctiongalleries.com/HudsonRiver.htm. Thoreau, Henry David. 2004. Exhibition: American Eden landscape masterworks of the Hudson river school from the collection of the Wadsworth Atheneum museum of art. North Carolina: Museum of Art. http://www.ncartmuseum.org/exhibitions/exhibitions/americaneden/americaneden.shtml. Read More