Asher B. Durand ca. 1854, photographer unknown, daguerreotype. Collection New- York Historical Society Library, New York, New York.

Kindred Spirits: Asher B. Durand and the American Landscape
Through April 27
San Diego Museum of Art
San Diego, California
(619) 232-7931
www.sdmart.org

Asher B. Durand (1796-1886) was one of the principal members of the historic Hudson River School movement of the early 19th century, the first official school of painters native to the United States. In this exhibition—which was organized by and originated at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, traveled to the Smithsonian American Art Museum, in Washington, DC, and is currently on view at the San Diego Museum, in California—the life and work of this influential landscape painter is explored in the exhibition of more than 50 of his paintings and engravings.

Among one of the earliest plein air painters, Durand was introduced to landscape painting by the founder and leader of the Hudson River School, Thomas Cole. Around 1837, Durand accompanied Cole on a sketching trip to Schroon Lake in the Adirondacks and shortly thereafter began concentrating on outdoor landscape painting. He spent his summers making numerous on-site sketches in the Catskills, Adirondacks, and the White Mountains of New Hampshire that would later serve as studies from which to create grand studio pieces of his observations from life.

Kindred Spirits 1849, oil. Collection Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas. © National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.	White Mountain Scenery, Franconia Notch, New Hampshire 1857, oil. Collection New-York Historical Society Museum, New York, New York.

Durand’s 1849 painting Kindred Spirits—for which this exhibition is named and the work for which he is probably most well known—was painted as a tribute to his mentor Thomas Cole upon his untimely death of pneumonia in 1848. The painting pictures Cole and poet William Cullen Bryant standing on an outcropping overlooking a beautiful expanse of greenery in the wilderness of the Catskill Mountains. The piece was commissioned by a collector of Cole’s work, who asked Durand to capture the “kindred-spirit” friendship between the painter and poet. This sentiment was inspired by John Keats’ sonnet O Solitude, in which the poet ruminates on the awe-inspiring aspects of nature and concludes:

Yet the sweet converse of an innocent mind,
Those words are images of thoughts refin’d,
Is my soul’s pleasure; and sure it must be
Almost the highest bliss of human-kind,
When to thy haunts two kindred spirits flee.