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 :. | Landscape with Birches | Landscape | Hudson River Looking Toward the Catskill | Study of a Wood Interior | Mountain Stream |
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Ramon marti alsina
Spanish , 1826-1894 He studied in Paris in successive stages over which he came to know the work of Courbet, the French Realists and the Barbizon school. In the end he even adapted to Impressionism. He is considered the best representative of Spanish Realism..
Jean Honore Fragonard
1732-1806 French Jean Honore Fragonard Locations French painter. He studied with François Boucher in Paris c. 1749. He subsequently won a Prix de Rome, and while in Italy (1756 ?C 61) he traveled extensively and executed many sketches of the countryside, especially the gardens at the Villa d Este at Tivoli, and developed a great admiration for the work of Giovanni Battista Tiepolo. In 1765 his large historical painting Coresus Sacrifices Himself to Save Callirhoë was purchased for Louis XV and won Fragonard election to the French Royal Academy. He soon abandoned this style to concentrate on landscapes in the manner of Jacob van Ruisdael, portraits, and the decorative, erotic outdoor party scenes for which he became famous (e.g., The Swing, c. 1766). The gentle hedonism of such party scenes epitomized the Rococo style. Although the greater part of his active life was passed during the Neoclassical period, he continued to paint in a Rococo idiom until shortly before the French Revolution, when he lost his patrons and livelihood.
paolo uccello
(b Florence, c. 1397; d Florence, 10 Dec 1475). Italian painter, draughtsman, mosaicist and designer of stained glass. His work vividly illustrates the principal issues of Florentine art during the first half of the 15th century. Trained within the tradition of the Late Gothic style, he eventually became a leading exponent of the application of linear perspective based on the mathematical system established by Filippo Brunelleschi and Leon Battista Alberti. It is the merging of these two diametrically opposed tendencies that forms the basis of Uccello's style. As well as painting on panel and in fresco (many of his works in this medium have been severely damaged), he was also a master mosaicist and produced designs for stained glass.