Asher Brown Durand

Meanwhile, his good friend and frequent sketching partner, Thomas Cole, was encouraging Durand to give up print-making for painting, something that may not have taken much persuasion as apparently he had become “disenchanted with engraving. (Boettcher 252) In 1837, Cole, then the most famous landscape painter in America, and Durand took a sketching trip to Schroon Lake in the Adirondacks, and at that time, Durand became committed to landscape painting, which meant a major change in his career. On this trip and numerous others with Cole that included the Catskill and White Mountains, he did many oil sketches and watercolor studies, which he used later for the panoramic paintings that became his signature work.

Friendship with Luman Reed, a New York grocer, led to patronage that supported Durand during his transition. To make money, he did much portraiture, primarily of prominent Americans including a series of all the United States Presidents to that time. He also did some genre scenes.

From 1840 to 1841, he traveled in Europe with three engraver friends who would also turn to landscape paintings. These future painters were John Kensett, John Casilear, and Thomas Rossiter. In London, Durand was especially influenced by the serene, atmospheric work of John Constable, and commented that his painting expressed “more of simple truth and naturalness than any English landscape I have ever before met with”. (Boettcher, 252)

He returned to America to paint exclusively American landscapes, which were visual counterparts of his belief that God was in nature and that painting nature was a way of worshiping God. In his ‘Letters on Landscape Painting’ for an 1855 edition of Crayon, magazine, he espoused these theories and urged American landscape painters to develop their own style and to go directly into nature and paint, leaving behind the studio manipulation of sketches and contrived allegory of European landscape painters.

In 1849, just after the death of Cole, who had died the previous year, Durand, commissioned by art collector Jonathan Sturges, painted Kindred Spirits to immortalize Cole and transcendentalist poet William Cullen Bryant. The title is from a phrase of a sonnet by John Keats. (1)

Like Cole and Bryant, Durand was deeply religious, and found in nature the manifestation of God and the expression of that relationship through sublime landscape painting. In Kindred Spirits, Bryant depicted the two very fashionably dressed men standing on a ledge over an abyss where a misstep could land them in a canyon far below. The day is sunny; the view is both panoramic and intimate and is, in many ways, suggestive of a pleasant outing in the Catskill Mountains. But atmospheric light countered by heavy shadows and geographical contrasts of flatness and depth create a sense that nature has its own agenda. The fact that Cole and Bryant are barely discernible and are much diminished by these surroundings is ironic and appropriate. Although Cole and Bryant were two of the most famous men of their era, Kindred Spirits reflects their humility—their belief that humans were of much less importance than nature, where humans commune with god. In other words, nature is the primary focus rather than merely serving as a backdrop for human activity.