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 :. | Hudson River Looking Toward the Catskill | White Mountain Scenery,Franconia Notch | Dance on the Battery in the Presence of Peter Stuyvesant | Landscape | Dover Plain,Dutchess County |
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Eric Forbes-Robertson
(1865-1935). a figure and landscape painter a figure and landscape painter.was a Scottish painter of landscapes, flowers, and foliage, with children. He was a cousin of James Hornell. He was born in Australia, of Scottish parents, and he was brought up and lived practically all his life in Scotland, at Kirkcudbright. He studied for three years at the art school at Edinburgh, and for two years at Antwerp under Professor Verlat. Returning from Antwerp in 1885, he met George Henry and associated himself with the Glasgow School. Hornel and Henry collaborated upon "The Druids Bringing In The Mistletoe" (1890), a procession of priests bringing in the sacred mistletoe, gorgeous with polychrome and gold. The two worked side by side to achieve decorative splendor of color, Hornel boldly and freely employing texture effects produced by loading and scraping, roughening, smoothing, and staining. In 1893-94 the two artists spent a year and a half in Japan, where Hornel learned much about decorative design and spacing. Towards the close of the nineties his colors, while preserving their glow and richness, became more refined and more atmospheric, and his drawing more naturalistic, combining sensuous appeal with emotional and poetic significance. In 1901 he declined election to the Royal Scottish Academy. In 1901 he acquired Broughton House, a townhouse and garden in Kirkcudbright, which was his main residence for the rest of his life.
Samuel Lovett Waldo
American Painter, 1783-1861 American painter. After attending a country school and working on his father farm, he decided at the age of 16 to become an artist. He took lessons from Joseph Steward (1753-1822), a retired minister who operated a portrait studio in Hartford, CT. Waldo opened his own studio in Hartford in 1803, before moving on to paint portraits in Litchfield, CT, and Charleston, SC. In 1806, bearing letters of introduction to Benjamin West and John Singleton Copley, Waldo travelled to London, where he studied at the Royal Academy. His portrait of Mr M Dougle (untraced) was shown at the Royal Academy in 1808.
Frank Dillon
painted The Colossal Pair, Thebes in 1856