Asher B. Durand

Asher B. Durand painted American woods the way a botanist might look at them: individual trees, mossy rocks and running water, drawn with close attention. He argued that painters should study nature directly, and his careful studies of trunks and foliage became a model for the Hudson River School.

Born in New Jersey in 1796, he trained first as an engraver and was one of the best in the country before turning to oil painting around 1830, encouraged by the patron Luman Reed. After Thomas Cole’s death he painted Kindred Spirits (1849), showing Cole and the poet William Cullen Bryant on a ledge above a gorge in the Catskills. He died in 1886.

Pieces such as A Creek in the Woods and A Study from Nature show the close, forest floor view he did better than almost anyone of his time.