Asher B. Durand (1796-1886)

Asher B. Durand (1796-1886)

Born in 1796 in Jefferson Village (now Maplewood), New Jersey, Asher Brown Durand began his artistic career in 1812 as an apprentice to the engraver Peter Maverick in Newark. By 1817, Durand and Maverick formed a partnership, with the younger Durand assuming managerial responsibilities over the firm’s New York office. Following a dispute concerning Durand’s acceptance of John Trumbull’s commission to engrave his painting The Declaration of Independence, without first consulting with Maverick, the firm was dissolved in 1820 and three years later, with the Trumbull commission successfully completed, Durand soon established himself as the one of America’s premier engravers.  

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Durand was an active member of the New York art community and his work as an engraver brought him into the circles of the leading literary and artistic minds of the day, including that of his eventual mentor Thomas Cole.  In 1826, Durand joined ranks with a number of artists and craftsmen and helped to establish the National Academy of Design, later serving as president from 1845 to 1861. Having not received any formal academic training, Durand took full advantage of the Academy’s workshops and lectures, and according to his son John Durand in his 1894 biography of his father, became “both pupil and teacher. Not a moment was lost. None of his compeers, perhaps, pursued the study of art technically with more ardour and enthusiasm” [i]  His eagerness to improve upon his skills and explore new mediums resulted in his inclusion of three painted compositions, all biblical in subject matter, at National Academy exhibitions in the late 1820s.

Durand’s experiments with painting continued into the 1830s, with a concentration on genre scenes, historical narratives and commissioned portraits.  Around 1835, Luman Reed, a wealthy New York merchant and the most prominent art patron of the time, commissioned him to paint the portraits of President Andrew Jackson and all of the ex-U.S. Presidents, some from life and others done as copies from earlier portraits of Gilbert Stuart.  Durand was humbled by Reed’s patronage and in one of his letters home during a stay in Boston while painting John Quincy Adams wrote:

“…no inconvenience shall interfere in my carrying out the wishes of Mr. Reed, who seems to think of nothing else while here but to promote my best interests. You will smile to know that he assures me I shall yet ride in my own carriage. If I am ever able only to paint as well as he hopes and flatters himself that I will, I shall care but little for a carriage provided I continue able to walk and to work.” [ii]

With the presidential series completed, and having Luman Reed’s continued endorsement, Durand fulfilled his dream of becoming a professional painter and stopped engraving altogether by 1835.  Reed was the foremost proponent of American painting and his friendship and unwavering support at this early point in Durand’s painting career was vital to his progress. Reed’s acquaintances in the business world followed his example, commissioning additional work from Durand and his contemporaries. In the spring of 1836, the artist and his patron planned to visit their friend Thomas Cole in the Catskills when Mr. Reed was taken ill.  Sadly, he would not recover and passed away in June of that year.  The shock of Reed’s untimely death was felt throughout the art community, and deeply affected Durand, who did not only lose his major supporter but also a dear friend.  In a letter to Durand, shortly after Reed’s passing, Thomas Cole wrote:

“The tone of your letter induces me to urge again the necessity of your leaving the city for a time in order to renovate your strength and by that means your spirits—I have been and am much depressed—but I should be much more so if confined in the City—Nature may not cure but she will soothe” [iii]

In due course, Durand followed Cole’s advice and accompanied him on a sketching trip to Schroon Lake in the Adirondacks in 1837.  This excursion to nature must have effected the rejuvenation Cole promised, for soon after, Durand devoted his energies entirely to landscape painting, leaving behind a lucrative portrait career to pursue his art for the purpose of catering to his emotional and spiritual needs. He focused on the soothing qualities of the rural countryside and produced pleasing compositions, often depicting human figures engaged in some form of relaxation or restorative activity, meant to offer the spectator, his urban patrons, a peaceful respite from their real world stresses.  Around 1843, Durand began producing his first plein air painted sketches from nature, becoming one of the first American artists to paint out-of-doors.  These studies did not play an immediate role in his landscapes of the 1840s, but were vital to the paintings he would produce after the unexpected death of Thomas Cole in 1848. 

With his friend and mentor’s sudden absence, Durand was thrust to the forefront of American landscape painting and soon established his distinctive approach to the subject. Thematically, he continued to depict the bucolic reverie evident in his earlier work, but to these he applied the meticulous plein air studies of trees, roots, rocks and vegetation he had been producing for years.  His detailed drawings and paintings were fused with idealized compositions created back in his studio, and the natural world was transformed from a mere setting to being the central focus of his work.  Durand believed that Nature was the physical manifestation of God on earth and by closely studying and translating these unadorned splendors with paint to canvas, he was giving His creation the accuracy and prominence it deserved.  Having emerged from the shadow of Cole’s influence, Durand’s method of conceptual realist landscape painting became an inspiration for those who would follow.  In 1855, he wrote nine Letters on Landscape Painting for The Crayon magazine in which he espoused his theories to the new generation of landscape painters:

“Go first to Nature to learn to paint landscapes,…I would urge on every young student in landscape-painting, the importance of painting direct from Nature as soon as he shall have acquired the first rudiments of Art…Let him scrupulously accept whatever she present him, until he shall, in a degree, have become intimate with her infinity, and then he may approach her on more familiar terms, even venturing to choose and reject some portions of her unbounded wealth.”

---Letter I

 

[i] John Durand, The Life and Times of Asher B. Durand, p. 82.

[ii] Ibid, pp. 109-110.

[iii] David B. Lawall, Asher Brown Durand, His Art and Art Theory in relation to His Times, p. 199 (Thomas Cole papers, E. P. Lesley, Jr., ed., New York Historical Society)

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