Saturday 1 November 2008First major retrospective devoted to the art and career of Asher B. Durand in thirty-five years

London-based fine art publisher, D Giles Limited, in collaboration with the Brooklyn Museum, is proud to announce the publication of a major new illustrated survey to accompany the ground-breaking exhibition Kindred Spirits: Asher B. Durand and the American Landscape, the first major retrospective in thirty-five years devoted to Durand’s career.

Kindred Spirits: Asher B. Durand and the American Landscape features collectively over 120 paintings, engravings and drawings by the artist, including some of the most beautiful and well-known American landscape paintings of the nineteenth century. This richly illustrated volume reproduces works from every aspect of Durand’s long career as a major engraver, portrait painter and landscape painter, 100 of which are reproduced in stunning colour plates. These include the iconic Kindred Spirits (1849), and The First Harvest in the Wilderness (1855), splendid examples of wilderness, historical, and allegorical landscapes, as well as a generous selection of his famous plein air paintings, the Studies from Nature. Nearly 80 historical photographs and comparative images are also included.

Asher B. Durand (1796–1886), was one of the most important American artists of the nineteenth century. Durand was a central figure, both as an artist and as the major spokesman for the American landscape school. His works include some of the finest expressions of the American pastoral mode and the vertical-format forest interior; both modes were perfected, and the latter virtually invented in the United States, by Durand. He was the acknowledged dean of American landscape painting from his election as president of the National Academy of Design in 1845 until his death at the age of ninety.

Durand began his career as an engraver in 1821, receiving wide acclaim in 1823 for an engraving after John Trumbull’s The Declaration of Independence and firmly establishing his reputation as the finest engraver in the United States. In the 1830s Durand ended his engraving business and entered into a short, successful period as a portrait painter. In 1837, a sketching expedition to the Adirondacks with his close friend and mentor Thomas Cole led to Durand’s decision to concentrate on landscape painting. Durand’s annual summer trips to the Catskill, Adirondack, and White mountains yielded hundreds of drawings and oil sketches that he later incorporated into finished paintings.

Kindred Spirits: Asher B. Durand and the American Landscape is organized as a chronological and thematic survey that reflects the stages of Durand’s career, both before and after the moment when landscape became his sole focus and investigates the ways in which his mastery of each area of his practice—engraving, portraiture, and figural narrative—informed those that came after. The authors consider the six decades of Durand’s career, taking the reader from the earliest efforts of artists and writers to construct a national cultural identity by means of American scenery, on through the mid-century triumph and subsequent eclipse of what is now known as the Hudson River School.

Among the highlights of this book is Durand’s major work The First Harvest in the Wilderness (1855), the cornerstone of the Brooklyn Museum’s American painting collection and one of the first two works of art commissioned by the Brooklyn Institute (forerunner of the Brooklyn Museum) to inaugurate a permanent collection. Offering an insight into the status of the fine arts in the United States (and the booming city of Brooklyn) at mid-century, Durand’s landscape was imagined as a powerful allegory for the founding of the collection as a cultural oasis in Brooklyn’s wilderness. It was a fitting image to symbolize an event with both local and national significance, since Brooklyn was the only institution of its time to commission works by living artists to build a permanent collection.

The title of the book, and exhibition, makes reference to Durand’s most celebrated painting, Kindred Spirits (1849), an iconic image that operates at the chronological and intellectual center of Durand’s landscape career. Kindred Spirits, whose title is derived from a sonnet by John Keats, was commissioned by New York businessman and arts patron Jonathan Sturges as a gift for William Cullen Bryant, who had delivered the poet’s eulogy to Thomas Cole before the National Academy of Design the previous year. The painting depicts Bryant and Cole in the wilderness of the Catskill Mountains in New York and was intended not only as a homage to Cole but also as a demonstration of Durand’s position as leader of the landscape school. Other works reproduced in this volume include Thomas Cole (circa 1837), a sensitive portrayal of Cole painted at the peak of Durand’s powers as a portraitist; In the Woods (1855), a landmark painting composed from oil studies made in the Shokan region of the Catskills that was intended to evoke the primeval North American forest and represents one of Durand’s most important contributions to the American landscape vocabulary; Dover Plains, Dutchess County, New York (1848), one of Durand’s best-known images because an engraving after the work was distributed to the members of the American Art-Union; White Mountain Scenery, Franconia Notch, New Hampshire (1857), a classic panoramic view of the White Mountains of New Hampshire that was commissioned by the prominent New York collector Robert L. Stuart; and Kaaterskill Clove (1866), Durand’s final majestic treatment of this hallowed landmark, painted for the Century Association, of which he was a founder.

This extensively researched and long-overdue volume, and the accompanying exhibition, has been edited and organized for the Brooklyn Museum by Dr. Linda S. Ferber, Vice President and Director of the Museum Division of the New-York Historical Society and former Andrew W. Mellon Curator and Chair of American Art at the Brooklyn Museum. It includes essays contributed by Dr. Ferber; Dr. Barbara Dayer Gallati, Curator Emerita of American Art, Brooklyn Museum; and Kenneth T. Jackson, Jacques Barzun Professor of History at Columbia University, as well as an illustrated biographical chronology compiled by Sarah b. Snook and an appendix reprinting the entirety of Durand’s famous “Letters on Landscape Painting” of 1855.

This extensively researched and long-overdue volume, and the accompanying exhibition, has been edited and organized for the Brooklyn Museum by Dr. Linda S. Ferber, Vice President and Director of the Museum Division of the New-York Historical Society and former Andrew W. Mellon Curator and Chair of American Art at the Brooklyn Museum. It includes essays contributed by Dr. Ferber; Dr. Barbara Dayer Gallati, Curator Emerita of American Art, Brooklyn Museum; and Kenneth T. Jackson, Jacques Barzun Professor of History at Columbia University, as well as an illustrated biographical chronology compiled by Sarah b. Snook and an appendix reprinting the entirety of Durand’s famous “Letters on Landscape Painting” of 1855.

The Authors:
Linda S. Ferber, Vice President and Director of the Museum at the New-York Historical Society, was formerly Andrew W. Mellon Curator and Chair of American Art at the Brooklyn Museum. She is the author of Pastoral Interlude: William T. Richards in Chester County (2001) and coauthor of The New Path: Ruskin and the American Pre-Raphaelites (1985), with William H. Gerdts; Albert Bierstadt: Art and Enterprise (1991), with Nancy K. Anderson; and Masters of Color and Light: Homer, Sargent, and the American Watercolor Movement (1998), with Barbara Dayer Gallati. In 2002 Dr. Ferber received the Smithsonian Institution Lawrence A. Fleischman Award for Scholarly Excellence in the Field of American Art History.
Barbara Dayer Gallati is Curator Emerita of American Art, Brooklyn Museum. At Brooklyn she organized exhibitions including William Merritt Chase: Modern American Landscapes, 1886–1890 (2000) and Great Expectations: John Singer Sargent Painting Children (2004), for which she wrote the accompanying books. She is also the author of the monograph William Merritt Chase (1995) and Children of the Gilded Era: Portraits by Sargent, Renoir, Cassatt, and Their Contemporaries (2004) and the coauthor of Winslow Homer: Illustrating America (2000), with Marilyn S. Kushner and Linda S. Ferber.
Kenneth T. Jackson is Jacques Barzun Professor of History at Columbia University. He has served as president of the New-York Historical Society, the Society of American Historians, the Organization of American Historians, and the Urban History Association. His best-known book is Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (1985), which won both the Francis Parkman and Bancroft prizes. He is coauthor of Empire City: New York City Through the Centuries (2002), with David Dunbar, and editor-in-chief of The Encyclopedia of New York City (1995).

KINDRED SPIRITS
Asher B. Durand and the American Landscape

256 pages, 9 ½” x 11” (280 x 240mm)
100 colour and 100 black-and-white illustrations, hardback with colour dust jacket
Text: Up to 80,000 words, including Foreword, Preface and Acknowledgments, four principal chapters, Chronology, Appendix: “Letters on Landscape Painting”, Selected Bibliography and Index
ISBN: 978 1 904832 26 3 (13 digit)
Price: US$55.00/UK£30.00
Publication date: March 2007
Publisher: D. Giles Limited, London

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