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 :. | The Sketcher | Study form Nature,Hoboken,new jersey | The Colonmade in Elysian Fields | Francis William Edonds | On Schroom river looking Northwest |
Related Artists:
Gigo Gabashvili
(November 9, 1862 - October 28, 1936) was a Georgian painter and educator. His work was particularly influential since he was the first Georgian realistic artist to cover a wide range of subjects, both in oils and watercolor, including portraits, landscapes and scenes of everyday life. Born in Tbilisi, Georgia (then part of the Russian Empire), Gigo Gabashvili was educated at the academies of St. Petersburg (1886 - 1888) and Munich (1894 - 1897). Returning to his homeland, he made his debut as the first artist to have been honored with a personal exhibition in Tbilisi. From 1900 to 1920, he taught at the art school operated by the Caucasian Society for Promotion of Fine Arts. Gabashvili was one of the founding professors of the Tbilisi State Academy of Arts (1922) and was granted the title of the People's Artist of the Georgian SSR (1929). Gabashvili remained a staunch realist and made known his opposition to left-wing art. He died in Tsikhisdziri, Adjara, in 1936. He is best known for his series of vivid portraits of peasants, townsmen, and noblemen ("The Three Townsmen", 1893; "The Sleeping Khevsur", 1898; "The Drunk Khevsur", 1899; "A Kurd", 1903 - 1909; "The Three Generals", 1910; etc.) as well as multifigure scenes from Georgian ("Alaverdoba Festival", 1899) and Oriental life - many of them based on the sketches of his Central Asian journey in 1894 ("The Bazaar in Samarkand", 1894 - 1897; "The Divan-Bey Pool in Bukhara", 1897; etc.). Most of his works are now on display at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Tbilisi. His 1895 copy of "The Bazaar in Samarkand," created at the request of the U.S. diplomat and businessman Charles R. Crane who met him during his travel in the Caucasus, was sold for USD 1.36 million at Sotheby's in 2006.
Frederick goodall,R.A.
1822-1904 son of Edward Goodall. He was taught by his father and first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1838. His earliest subjects were rural genre scenes and landscapes, many derived from sketching trips made between 1838 and 1857 in Normandy, Brittany, Wales, Ireland, Scotland and Venice. In the 1850s he also painted subjects from British history. More significant for his subsequent career was his visit to Egypt from September 1858 to April 1859. In Cairo he lived in a house in the Coptic quarter with Carl Haag. Together the two artists went on expeditions to Giza to draw the Nile, the Sphinx and Pyramids, and to Suez and across the Red Sea to the Wells of Moses at 'Uyen Mesa. Goodall also made rapid sketches in the crowded streets of Cairo. 'My sole object in paying my first visit to Egypt', he wrote, 'was to paint Scriptural subjects'. The first of these, Early Morning in the Wilderness of Shur (London, Guildhall A.G.), was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1860 and won him critical and popular acclaim. In 1864 he was elected RA. Much of the rest of Goodall's long career was devoted to painting similar scenes of Egyptian life with biblical associations, for which he made reference to his sketches and to Egyptian artefacts and clothing. Their success prompted a second visit to Egypt in 1870-71.
Edward Caledon Bruce
painted Robert E. Lee in 1865