Asher B. Durand
1796-1886

After Thomas Cole's death, his role as mentor to younger members of the Hudson River School of landscape art fell to Asher Durand. Born in New Jersey in 1796, Durand was five years older than Cole and had already been earning a living as an engraver and painter before Cole's arrival in America . However, once he had seen what Cole was attempting and frequently accomplishing in his work, he became a convert to the same goals. Durand was associated with Cole in the public mind as well, the two considered by the mid-point of the 19 th century to be the two greatest American landscape painters. In 1847, the New York Evening Post declared:

Durand's close association with both Cole and the poet William Jennings Bryant, whose poems he frequently interpreted in his paintings, made it natural to step into Cole's role as leader after Cole's untimely death. He began by paying tribute to his two friends in a painting called “Kindred Spirits”, which depicted Bryant and Cole together on a rocky ledge overlooking the Catskills, viewing with awe an America they had not only discovered, but to some extent, invented.

Like Cole, Durand urged the younger artists to paint, not unvarnished reality, but the greater reality that represented the sublime. In a treatise on painting, he wrote:

. . . that picture is ideal whose component parts are representative of the utmost perfection of Nature, whether with regard to beauty or other considerations of fitness . . . In order to compose the ideal picture, then, the artist must . . . be able to gather from individuals the collective idea . . . when you shall have learned all that characterizes oak as oak, you will be prepared to apply those characteristics according to the requirements of ideal beauty, to the production of the ideal oak.

These concepts became integral to the development of younger American landscape artists. In his role as president of the National Academy of Design from 1845 to 1861 and through the remainder of his artistic career, Durand would influence artists such as Frederic Church, Jasper Cropsey, Thomas Moran, and Albert Bierstadt. Thanks to his leadership as well as Cole's innovation, the first great American school of art was founded and the vision of America as the New Eden preserved in all its visual magnificence for generations to come.

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