Asher Brown Durand was a leader in the Hudson River School that dominated pre-Civil War American nineteenth century painting. He is perhaps best known for “Kindred Spirits”, where he depicts Thomas Cole and William Culling Bryant, both important in the intellectual life of their times as well as influences on Durant, the two of them standing on a crag in the Adirondacks, their perch seeming to this viewer quite precarious and they too dressed up for going on a hike. I keep waiting for them to trip and fall off into space. So a picture meant as a tribute to his friends becomes both dramatic and comic because of the way in which it is composed and so has resonated as a great work of American art ever since.
Durand is less well known for what are his real contributions to the American landscape, which are a set of paintings in which humans either figure very little or not at all. What they depict, instead, are the visual qualities of nature that make of it a different experience than when people are a central focus, as happens in Bierstadt and any number of other landscape painters. This is nature as it is experienced rather than in the grand terms which are advocated by Ruskin to show nature as different from cultivated land, Durand, instead, is looking at nature as if were not a contrast to human life but something on its own.
Look at his “Kaaterskill Landscape” from 1850. There are a symphony of spaces intertwined with one another. At the top are tall thin trees, one standing in front of another, the trees, however,not duplicates of one another but, as happens in nature, each one having its own features. Then, moving down, there are thicker trees and then stones with multifaceted faces and then thicker stones on their side rather than, like the earlier ones, forming a cliff. There is a centerline of a fallen tree without bark crossing another fallen tree and reaching from the upper part of the painting to its lower part, and so tying together a composition that seems to be made up of random pieces bound up with one another only in that the forces of nature have piled them up here in one place. It is an impressive assemblage of spaces without any intervention by a Cubist metaphysics to explain why an artist has arranged the spaces as he has. Rather, there are any number of places in a forest that look just like this spot, even if different in detail, but not different in that there are so many experiences of shape and color and texture to attend to that are just there for contemplation.
A different way to appreciate nature is provided by Durant’s “The Beeches”, from 1845. The focus here is quite different. There is a shepherd and some cattle and a lake in the distance but the “subject” of the painting, as if it were a portrait, is the two beech trees in the foreground, slightly left of center, the setting only to draw attention to the very unself-conscious duet of trees to be observed more closely. The two trees are close together and yet very different from one another. One is brown, the other gray, the brown one much thicker and with a different bark than the gray one. Moreover, life events have shaped the trees far more than is true with humans who are marked by beauty marks or folds of skin. The gray tree early in life sent out two different trunks while the brown tree was not so marked by a life event. There is an ecology that surrounds both trees: there are stumps nearby which allow the two trees to get sufficient sunlight, and there is foliage round the trunks of the two living trees and some creeping up on the brown tree. Modern tree biologists would say that the two trees probably communicate between themselves in that their root systems are intertwined and so there are chemical messages sent back and forth about dangerous parasites or changing weather conditions. Durant captures all of this as well as the sense that another and a distinct history could be told about some other set of trees in the forest, perhaps of the two opposite to the right and further removed from the duet on which he focusses. All and all, a remarkably accurate evocation of the realities of nature rather than a rhapsodical account of what nature means to people.
Perhaps Durant’s crowning achievement as a realistic painter of nature is his “Landscape”, from 1859. There is no human in the picture though there is an approximation of a clearing in the center of the painting, but without a hint of a path going towards it, and there is also a lake in the background so as to provide a sense of relatively open spaces through which the sun can shine and so not be oppressive to the purported onlooker, who is not in the painting but the visitor at the art gallery or museum where the painting is viewed. The trees have distinct leaves that are not identical to one another, when even so superb a painter of nature as Poussin has all his leaves look alike. The trees to the left of the painting are thin and nearly white while the trees to the right are different colors and of different bark. The trees are therefore notable but none of them are majestic. They are subdued, run of the mill trees, just existing out in the forest far from human observation. That is an accomplishment: to see trees for what they are rather than as tributes to their own magnificence. Durant captures what we see, as observers, when we see a tree: not a tribute to God but just another fact of nature.
Here, perhaps, is a place where a bit of the intellectual context of the time does help explain what a painter is up to. In his letters on landscape painting, serialized in the 1850’s, Durant says that a painter should draw before he paints so that he gets the details right. He says: “Every kind of tree has its traits of individuality...with careful attention, these peculiarities are easily learned”. So, as is proper, the observations of a painter are most reliable when he describes what goes into the art of painting. There is an additional resonance, however, which reverberates from the term “individuality”. This was the time of the Transcendentalists and what the term meant for Ralph Waldo Emerson was the uniqueness of individual personhood, each person answering to their own drummer in the midst of the turmoil of social conflict. The tree is therefore a metaphor for the individual soul, each one living on its own in the forest, not known to the outside world but meaningful nonetheless. And yet, in Durand’s view, that does not make people magnificent, only distinct souls, and that is an insight worth remembering.
Durand, by the time of his letters on landscape painting, was a major figure in the American artistic community. He was a long time director of the American Academy of the Arts in New York City and so had somewhat the standing we would now assign to a public intellectual. He was doing something important in raising landscape to the stature it was now recognized as having, replacing, for a while, the centrality of portrait painting, a position it would not surrender until Eakins and John Singer Sargent and, after that, the arrival of Impressionism. This turn to the landscape had also taken place in Germany, but to very different intent. There, Caspar David Friedrich also eliminates the observer and shows nature close up. The difference is that Friedrich, a Romantic painter of the 1820’s, resonates with a sense of the Gothic, as in his “The Lonely Tree”. For Friedrich, there are demons in the forest and the stones in the field are religious relics that hide more than they reveal. Every part of nature gives off an aura of the eerie while in Durant and, one can reasonably argue, in the American landscape, that is not the case. Nature is as real as the city and resides in its own self rather than in its emotional reverberations. That is the accomplishment of American landscapes in the nineteenth century: to be honestly realistic and so carry out the project set out by Charles Willson Peale in his “The Artist in his Museum”, from 1822, the same year as Friedrich’s major paintings, which is to portray natural history and archaeology rather than mythology of one sort or another. Nature was a science rather than a set of doleful emotions. It seems to me that the persistent impulse of American landscape painters is to be realistic and that is what opens up America as a whole to an optimistic and pragmatic viewpoint, the wilds not ominous as it is in both Europe and Latin America, but ripe for settlement and domination. That may be to press the connection between mere landscape paintings and the overall distinctiveness of American history, but so be it.
