Asher Brown Durand

Asher Brown Durand
American Hudson River School painter, engraver & printmaker
born 1796 - died 1886

Student of: Peter Maverick (1780-1831).
Teacher of: Samuel Colman (1832-1920).
Nephew of: Peter Maverick (1780-1831).
Employee of: John Trumbull (1756-1843)

Asher Brown Durand
American, 1796 - 1886

Asher B. Durand was born on August 21, 1796, in Jefferson Village (now Maplewood), New Jersey, and studied engraving with his father, a watchmaker and silversmith. From 1812 to 1817 Asher Brown Durand was apprenticed to the New Jersey engraver Peter Maverick. In 1817 Asher Brown Durand formed a partnership with Maverick and opened a branch of the firm in New York. Around 1818 Durand began informal study and drawing from plaster casts at the American Academy of Fine Art, where his work came to the attention of the Academy's president, John Trumbull (1756-1843). In 1820 Trumbull commissioned Durand to engrave his painting The Declaration of Independence (1787-1820, Yale University Art Gallery). Asher Brown Durand became a leading engraver, and enjoyed considerable success producing bank notes, book illustrations, portraits, and copies after other artists' works.

In the 1820s and 1830s Durand owned a series of printmaking firms and was active in New York cultural circles. In 1825 Asher Brown Durand helped organize the New York Drawing Association, which in 1826 became the National Academy of Design, with Durand as one of the fifteen founding members. In these same years Asher Brown Durand was also involved with several other art groups, including James Fenimore Cooper's Bread and Cheese Club and the Sketch Club.

In the early 1830s Durand worked less frequently as an engraver and began painting portraits. Around 1835, inspired by Thomas Cole (1801-1848) and encouraged by the prominent New York merchant and art patron Luman Reed (1785-1836), Durand ended his career as an engraver in favor of painting. Continuing to produce portraits, Asher Brown Durand also created in the mid-1830s a number of paintings based on historical subjects and genre themes. In 1837 Asher Brown Durand accompanied Cole on a sketching trip to the Schroon Lake region in the Adirondacks and the following year Asher Brown Durand contributed nine landscapes to the annual National Academy of Design exhibition. In 1838 and 1839 Asher Brown Durand again made summer sketching trips and contributed landscapes to the Academy exhibitions. In 1840 Asher Brown Durand exhibited Landscape, Composition, Morning and Landscape, Composition, Evening (both National Academy of Design), an allegorical pair inspired by Cole.- American Asher Brown Durand oil painting abstract artist - Asher Brown Durand oil painting American, abstract art oil paintings Asher Brown Durand Bio by abstract painting art of American oil paintings abstract, Durand oil paintings.

In the summer of 1840 Durand went with fellow artists John F. Kensett (1816-1872), John Casilear (1811-1893), and Thomas P. Rossiter (1818-1871) to Europe, where Asher Brown Durand studied the works of Old Masters, especially Claude Lorrain (1600-1682). After his return to New York in July 1841 Asher Brown Durand exhibited paintings of European scenery, but he soon resumed summer sketching tours in the Catskills and the Hudson River Valley. In 1845 Durand was named president of the National Academy, a position Asher Brown Durand would hold until 1861. He increasingly believed that direct study of nature should be the primary inspiration for American artists and began producing meticulously painted works that were much admired for their faithful depictions of natural forms and light and atmosphere. Such works also expressed sentiments similar to those in the poetry of his friend William Cullen Bryant, and several of his paintings of the 1850s were directly inspired by Bryant poems.

The titles of oil painting old master Asher Brown Durand