The Life and Times of Asher B. Durand

John Durand

introduction by Linda S. Ferber, vice president and museum director for the New York Historical Society

A highly enjoyable reading experience for historian and non-specialist alike.Linda S. Ferber vice president and museum director for the New–York Historical Society

Asher B. Durand (1796–1886) once overheard the great painter John Trumbull advise a young artist, You had better learn to make shoes or dig potatoes than to become a painter in this country. Fortunately for American art, Asher Durand did not heed that advice.

Perhaps best known as the painter of Kindred Spirits - the quintessential Hudson River School painting - Durand became the dean of American landscape painters, as Linda S. Ferber writes in her introduction to this edition, and was one of the most important American artists of the nineteenth century, a central figure as an artist, as a founder of art institutions, and as the acknowledged leader of the American Landscape school from his election as president of the National Academy of Design in 1845 until his death at the age of ninety. Durand’s six-decade career spanned the period from the earliest efforts of artists and writers to construct a national cultural identity on through the mid-century triumph and, later, the eclipse of what is now known as the Hudson River School. In this biography first published in 1894, Durand’s son John reconstructed the artist’s life from family records and documents and his own recollections, creating what has become an essential source of biographical data on Durand, his paintings, his engravings, and his patrons. We still continue to acknowledge the importance of John Durand’s contribution in the fact that every major publication on Asher B. Durand since then has mined the rich contents of this captivating volume. Linda S. Ferber

6 x 9, 256 pp, 14 illustrations, $17.95, ISBN: 1-883789-50-8