Asher Brown Durand

Asher Brown Durand , 1796-1886, American painter and engraver, b. near Newark, N.J. He established a reputation by his engravings of Trumbull's Signing of the Declaration of Independence, followed by a series of engraved portraits of eminent contemporaries. After 1835, Durand devoted himself to painting, producing portraits of several of the Presidents. After a year of travel and study in Europe, he turned to landscape painting, becoming a leader of the Hudson River school . At first he was painstaking and meticulous, but later his rendering became more spontaneous. Examples of his work are In the Woods and The Beeches (Metropolitan Mus.); Woodland Brook and Franconia Notch (N.Y. Public Library); and Mountain Forest (Corcoran Gall.). Durand was a founder of the National Academy of Design, New York City, and its president from 1845 to 1861. Two of his allegorical paintings are there, Morning of Life and Evening of Life.

Bibliography: See biography by his son, John Durand (1894, repr. 1970).

Durand, Asher B. (1796–1886). American painter and engraver. His early work was mainly as an engraver and he established his reputation with his print after John Trumbull's Signing of the Declaration of Independence and with portraits of eminent contemporaries. In the 1830s he turned increasingly to painting. At first he worked mainly as a portraitist, but then devoted himself to landscape, becoming a leading figure of the Hudson River School. Thomas Cole was a major source of inspiration, and Durand's most famous painting, Kindred Spirits (1849, New York Public Lib.), was painted as a memorial to him; it shows Cole (who had died the previous year) and the poet William Cullen Bryant admiring spectacular scenery in the Catskill Mountains, New York State.