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 :. | A Pastoral Scene | Kindred Spirits | Landscape | Naivete | Jonathan Sturges |
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ulrika melin
Ulrika Drufva, född 1767, död 1834, var en svensk textilkonstnär, ledamot av Fria konsternas Akademi. Ulrika Melin var dotter till major Lars Melin, syster till generalmajor Henrik Georg Melin och från 1788 gift med ståthållaren på Västerås slott Peter Thure Gerhard Drufva. Melin var konstnär och "egde en ovanlig skicklighet uti att sy landskap". Hon invaldes i akademin år 1784 för ett arbete i vit satin, inspirerad av Claude Lorrain.
Adolfo Muller-Ury
(March 29, 1862 - July 6, 1947) was a Swiss-born American portrait painter and impressionistic painter of roses and still life. He was born Felice Adolfo Meller on March 29, 1862 at Airolo, in the Ticino in Switzerland, into a prominent patrician family whose lineage descended from Alfred the Great, Charlemagne and Doge Pietro Orseolo of Venice, through the von Rechburg family (a lady from which family married a Meller) and by the 18th and 19th centuries included mercenaries, lawyers, hoteliers and businessmen. His father was lawyer Carl Alois Meller (1825 - 1887), Gerichtspräsident (Presiding Judge) of the Cantonal Courts, and his mother Genovefa Lombardi (1836 - 1920), daughter of Felice Lombardi who was Director of the Hospice on the St Gotthard Pass, which he took over from the Capuchin monks who had run this for centuries. Adolfo was their sixth of nineteen children, most of whom survived infancy. The family spoke Airolese mainly, a local dialect of Ticinese Italian, as well as Swiss-German. His family were Roman Catholic.
Gustave Loiseau
French, 1865-1935 French painter. He was apprenticed first to a butcher and in 1880 to a house painter. It was not until 1887, when he received a small inheritance, that he was able to devote himself to painting. He spent a year studying modelling and design at the Ecole des Arts D?coratifs in Paris and then entered the studio of the French landscape painter Fernand Just Quignon (b 1854) for six months in 1889. After settling in 1890 in Pont-Aven in Brittany, where he met the painters Maxime Maufra and Henri Moret (1856-1913), he produced such carefully executed works as the Green Rocks (1893; Geneva, Petit Pal.). It was not until 1894, however, that he met Gauguin on the latter return from Tahiti, and though he did not accept Gauguin synthetist ideas the encounter led to a stronger structure and freer brushstrokes in his subsequent work.