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.
Louis Buvelot Swiss-born Australian Painter
1814-1888
was a Swiss-born landscape painter who emigrated to Australia in 1865 and influenced the Heidelberg School of painters. Buvelot was born in Morges, Vaud, Switzerland, second son of Francois Simeon Buvelot, postal official, and his wife Jeanne-Louise nee Heizer, a school teacher. Louis Buvelot worked under Marc-Louis Arland at Lausanne, and from around 1834 continued his studies at Paris with Camille Flers, a well-known landscape painter of the day. After a few months there he migrated to Bahia, Brazil where he worked on his uncle's coffee plantation. In October 1840 Buvelot moved to Rio de Janeiro and attracted the notice of the emperor Dom Pedro II, who bought some of his pictures and decorated him with the Order of the Rose. In November 1843 Buvelot married Marie-Felicite, nee Lalouette (born 1816). Buvelot returned to Switzerland in 1852 and in 1856 was awarded a silver medal for a picture exhibited at Berne. Summer Afternoon 1866, oil on canvas, 76.6 x 118.9 cm) by Louis Buvelot (1814?C1888
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