Invoking a phrase from John Keats's seventh sonnet, "O Solitude," Sturges asked Durand to portray Cole and Bryant together as "kindred spirits" in the landscape. ![]() Sturges gave the painting to Bryant in honor of the eulogy the poet delivered at the memorial service for Cole, who died in February 1848. Durand was Cole's earliest disciple and a close friend of Bryant, and executed this picture at the request of Jonathan Sturges, a patron of both artists. ![]() The men stand on a ledge in one of the cloves, or gorges, of the Catskill Mountains, the source of the landscapes that made Cole famous and continued to inspire his followers. Its subjects are Thomas Cole (with portfolio), the founding father of the school, and William Cullen Bryant, the well-known nature poet and editor. After that, it goes to Arkansas, where the Walton-funded museum is expected to be completed in 2009.Kindred Spirits is the quintessential Hudson River School landscape. Walton, one of the heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune, is a member of the National Gallery's Trustees Council.Īfter the gallery's showing, the painting is scheduled to be included in a 2007 retrospective of Durand's work at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. A leader among landscape painters, he wrote a definitive guide to the principles of the Hudson River School in 1855. "First is the vertical forest interior second is the depiction of more panoramic and extensive landscape vistas."ĭurand, a native of New Jersey, was a successful engraver before he was inspired by Cole and turned to painting in the 1830s. "Durand perfected two standard formats of the Hudson River School," Kelly said. Mountains fade into the background, as light pierces the center of the scene. A waterfall is a graceful touch in the background. The figures of Cole and Bryant are not the centerpiece of the picture or the strict focus of "Kindred Spirits." Tree branches loom over their heads, providing a bridge between the rocks. "We got a real kick out of Alice Walton's buying that fancy-shmancy Hudson River School painting right out from under the snooty noses of those big city types," said the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in an editorial. The Arkansas newspapers shot back, defending the region and Alice Walton. And a writer for the New York Sun said the sale was "quite frankly, New York's most egregious act of self-desecration since the demolition of Pennsylvania Station." " 'Kindred Spirits' belongs here it's part of this city, part of us," wrote Thomas. Thomas took the library to task for the sale, arguing that part of the city's history was being squandered. But New Yorkers might ponder whether there was an alternative to its ending up there." "It's well and good that a museum may someday spring up in Arkansas to show Durand's painting. "The sale of this Durand is poignant," wrote critic Michael Kimmelman in the New York Times. Losing it to Arkansas touched off a cultural skirmish. Commissioned in 1848, the painting was given by Bryant's family to the New York library in early 1904. Generations of New Yorkers passed the painting as they used the vaulted Fifth Avenue reading room. The painting is a tribute to their friendship, but also to the idealized nature that they saluted in their art. "Kindred Spirits" shows Thomas Cole, the American artist and the style's main proponent, and William Cullen Bryant, the esteemed poet, at the edge of a precipice in the Catskills Mountains, their walking sticks in hand. The Hudson River School was a mid-19th century movement that depicted the untamed woods of New York and other places in romantic, rustic ways. "It is an icon of the Hudson River School," said Franklin Kelly, the National Gallery's senior curator of American and British paintings. The canvas will eventually wind up at a museum complex that the Walton family is building in Bentonville, Ark. Walton has loaned the 1849 painting to the National Gallery, where it will be on view in the West Building for seven months. The gallery and the Metropolitan Museum of Art were unsuccessful bidders at the auction. ![]() One of New York's cultural treasures, a painting recently auctioned for $35 million after considerable teeth-gnashing by the city's cultural elite, goes on display today at the National Gallery of Art.Īsher Durand's "Kindred Spirits," an American masterpiece that hung in the New York Public Library for more than a century, was snapped up by Alice Walton, through the Walton Family Foundation (a byproduct of the Wal-Mart empire).
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