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Asher Brown Durand

American painter (1796–1886)

Asher Brown Durand
Summary

American painter (1796–1886)

FieldValue
nameAsher Brown Durand
imageAsher B. Durand by Abraham Bogardus.jpg
captionAsher Brown Durand, , by Abraham Bogardus
birth_date
birth_placeMaplewood, New Jersey, U.S.
death_date
death_placeMaplewood, New Jersey, U.S.
known_forPainting, Landscape art
movementHudson River School

Asher Brown Durand (August 21, 1796 – September 17, 1886) was an American engraver and painter of the Hudson River School.

Early life

Durand was born in, and eventually died in, Maplewood, New Jersey (then called Jefferson Village). He was the eighth of eleven children. Durand's father was a watchmaker and a silversmith.

Durand was apprenticed to an engraver from 1812 to 1817 and later entered into a partnership with the owner of the company, Charles Cushing Wright (1796–1854), who asked him to manage the company's New York office. He engraved Declaration of Independence for John Trumbull during 1823, which established Durand's reputation as one of the country's finest engravers. The project took three years and he was paid $3,000. Between 1829 and 1850, he submitted illustrations and engravings for The Token and Atlantic Souvenir annual gift book, including the title page for the 1829 volume. Contemporary critic John Neal praised Durand's engraving of The Wife by Samuel F.B. Morse for The Atlantic Souvenir (1830), which Neal said was better than the original painting.

Durand helped organize the New York Drawing Association in 1825, which would become the National Academy of Design; he would serve the organization as president from 1845 to 1861. There he exhibited 181 engravings and paintings between 1826 and 1860.

Asher's engravings on bank notes were used as the portraits for America's first postage stamps, the 1847 series. Along with his brother Cyrus he also engraved some of the succeeding 1851 issues. Contemporary art historian William Dunlap dubbed Durand America's first engraver.

Painting career

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 remembered particularly 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."

landscape]]. This was painted as a tribute to Cole upon Cole's death in 1848 and a gift to Bryant. The painting, donated by Bryant's daughter Julia to the [[New York Public Library]] in 1904, was sold by the library using [[Sotheby's]] at an auction in May 2005 to [[Alice Walton]] for a purported $35 million (the sale was performed 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.

Another of Durand's paintings is Progress (1853), commissioned by a railroad executive. The landscape depicts America's progress, from a state of nature (on the left, where Native Americans look on), towards the right, where there are roads, telegraph wires, a canal, warehouses, railroads, and steamboats. In December 2018, it was purchased by an anonymous donor for an estimated $40 million and given to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

In 2007, the Brooklyn Museum exhibited nearly sixty of Durand's works in the first monographic exhibition devoted to the painter in more than thirty-five years. The show, entitled "Kindred Spirits: Asher B. Durand and the American Landscape", was exhibited from March 30 to July 29, 2007.

From October 1, 2010 - January 9, 2011, the Fundación Juan March Madrid exhibited "The American Landscapes of Asher B. Durand (1796–1886)," a retrospective of Durand’s work.

Durand is interred in Brooklyn, New York, in Green-Wood Cemetery.

External video

Asher Brown Durand

References

References

  1. (February 2025). "Charles Cushing Wright (1796-1854)".
  2. "1847: America's First Stamps".
  3. [http://www.philatelicdatabase.com/united-states/the-men-who-engraved-early-u-s-stamps-1955/ ''The Men Who Engraved Early U.S. Stamps'' (1955)]
  4. Lovejoy, David S.. (Winter 1955). "American Painting in Early Nineteenth-Century Gift Books". American Quarterly.
  5. (11 January 2019). "Acquisitions of the month: December 2018".
  6. "The American Landscapes of Asher B. Durand (1796–1886) {{!}} Fundación Juan March".
Wikipedia Source

This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page.

1796-births 1886-deaths 19th-century-american-painters american-male-painters burials-at-green-wood-cemetery hudson-river-school-painters american-romantic-painters american-landscape-painters people-from-maplewood,-new-jersey artists-from-south-orange,-new-jersey davy-crockett articles-containing-video-clips 19th-century-american-engravers
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