Asher Brown Durand

1796 - 1886 • American • Painter • Romantic/Hudson River School

"In recommending you, in the Beginning of your studies, directly to Nature, I would not deceive you with the expectation, that you will thus most speedily acquire the art of picture-making- that is much sooner acquired in the studio or the picture gallery. I refer you to Nature early, that you may receive your first impressions of beauty and sublimity." - Asher Brown Durand

Kindred Spirits (1849) is Durand's most celebrated painting and a paean both to COLE, who had died the year before, and to I 9th-century American landscape painting of the HUDSON RIVER SCHOOL. It is a dramatic scene of a gorge, with the figures of Cole and his close friend William Cullen Bryant standing on a ledge, talking. This is just the kind of landscape the two loved, and there is also a wealth of the kind of symbolism Cole loved to use, including a broken tree trunk to represent a life cut short, a bird flying into the hazy distance signifying Cole's departed soul, and a nearby bird that is surely Bryant's. The picture, commissioned by one of Durand's longtime patrons, was presented to Bryant (also a friend of Durand) in appreciation of his moving oration at Cole's funeral. Full of ROMANTIC sentimentality, glorification of nature, and spiritualism, Kindred Spirits also pays homage to the great American wilderness in which they all saw the nation's Manifest Destiny (see COLE). The comment made by Durand, quoted above, appeared in a periodical called the Crayon, published in America for writings about art.