“Kindred Spirits”
Here is a wonderful painting from the Hudson River School of Art.
“Kindred Spirits” is a beautiful oil on canvas painting by the American artist, Asher B. Durand, from 1849. This piece was a final homage to the father of the Hudson River School of Art, Thomas Cole, who died suddenly at the age of 47. It was commissioned in 1848, the year of Cole’s death, by art collector and Hudson River School patron, Jonathan Sturges. It was to be a thank you gift for the poet, William Cullen Bryant, who delivered a eulogy for Thomas Cole at his memorial.
This painting features the poet, William Cullen Bryant, with the artist, Thomas Cole, in the location of their greatest inspiration, the Catskill Mountains. Cole is on the right, with his painting portfolio in his hands. Cole founded the Hudson River School of Art which depicted the American landscape with Romanticism ideals featuring the picturesque, the pastoral, and the sublime. He was known to take numerous sketches of scenes he wanted to paint, with numbers referencing colors detailed in his drawings. In his studio, these sketches would be turned into large-scale canvas paintings.
William Cullen Bryant was an American poet, writer, and editor. He is considered a Fireside poet, along the likes of grand names such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and John Greenleaf Whittier. They were American Romantic poets, and their poems touched on lofty subjects, including nature, and morality. As with the Hudson River School artists, the Fireside poets were extremely popular with the public.
The painting was named after a line from the English Romantic poet, John Keats’s seventh sonnet, titled “O Solitude”. The poem reads:
O Solitude! if I must with thee dwell,
Let it not be among the jumbled heap
Of murky buildings; climb with me the steep,—
Nature’s observatory—whence the dell,
Its flowery slopes, its river’s crystal swell,
May seem a span; let me thy vigils keep
’Mongst boughs pavilion’d, where the deer’s swift leap
Startles the wild bee from the fox-glove bell.
But though I’ll gladly trace these scenes with thee,
Yet the sweet converse of an innocent mind,
Whose words are images of thoughts refin’d,
Is my soul’s pleasure; and it sure must be
Almost the highest bliss of human-kind,
When to thy haunts two kindred spirits flee.
- John Keats
Durand created a composite landscape that included two features of the Catskills that both artists were inspired by in their art, Kaaterskill Clove, and Kaaterskill Falls. These two locations are still popular tourist destinations to this day. Durand masterfully combined these two familiar locations into a beautiful landscape. The last names of Cole and Bryant are painted as if carved onto a tree in the foreground of the painting on the left side of the canvas. In 2005, this painting sold at auction for $35 million dollars.
What a fitting eulogy for a painter…
“Kindred Spirits” is currently on display at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas.
For more on Asher B. Durand, please visit his short biography here.
You can find more artists to learn about here.
