Asher Brown Durand

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Asher Brown Durand
Landscape art
MovementHudson River School

Asher Brown Durand (August 21, 1796 – September 17, 1886) was an American painter of the Hudson River School.

Early life

Durand was born in, and eventually died in, Maplewood, New Jersey (then called Jefferson Village). He was the eighth of eleven children. Durand's father was a watchmaker and a silversmith.

Durand was apprenticed to an

Declaration of Independence for John Trumbull during 1823, which established Durand's reputation as one of the country's finest engravers. Durand helped organize the New York Drawing Association in 1825, which would become the National Academy of Design
; he would serve the organization as president from 1845 to 1861.

Asher's engravings on bank notes were used as the portraits for America's first postage stamps, the 1847 series.[2] Along with his brother Cyrus he also engraved some of the succeeding 1851 issues.[3]

Painting career

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 remembered particularly 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."

landscape. This was painted as a tribute to Cole upon Cole's death in 1848 and a gift to Bryant. The painting, donated by Bryant's daughter Julia to the New York Public Library in 1904, was sold by the library using Sotheby's at an auction in May 2005 to Alice Walton
for a purported $35 million (the sale was performed 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.

Another of Durand's paintings is Progress (1853), commissioned by a railroad executive. The landscape depicts America's progress, from a state of nature (on the left, where Native Americans look on), towards the right, where there are roads, telegraph wires, a canal, warehouses, railroads, and steamboats. In December 2018, it was purchased by an anonymous donor for an estimated $40 million and given to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.[4]

In 2007, the Brooklyn Museum exhibited nearly sixty of Durand's works in the first monographic exhibition devoted to the painter in more than thirty-five years. The show, entitled "Kindred Spirits: Asher B. Durand and the American Landscape", was exhibited from March 30 to July 29, 2007. Durand is interred in Brooklyn, New York, in Green-Wood Cemetery.

Gallery

External video

Asher Brown Durand

See also

References

  1. ^ "Charles Cushing Wright (1796-1854)". Retrieved 14 August 2017.
  2. ^ "1847: America's First Stamps". Archived from the original on 2018-07-31. Retrieved 2016-11-21.
  3. ^ The Men Who Engraved Early U.S. Stamps (1955)
  4. ^ "Acquisitions of the month: December 2018". Apollo Magazine. 11 January 2019.

Further reading

Books
Newspapers
Online publications

External links

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Wikisource has the text of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica article "Durand, Asher Brown".
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