Kindred Spirits

1849

Oil on canvas, 111.8 × 91.4 cm. Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas

Two men stand on a rock ledge high in the wooded Catskill Mountains. The picture honors Durand's fellow landscape painter Thomas Cole, whose death in 1848 it commemorates.

Look at the pair: Cole holds a portfolio and talks with the poet William Cullen Bryant.
Durand signed and dated it at lower left; the names Bryant and Cole are lettered at center left.
The tall, upright canvas stacks overhanging trees, cliffs, a distant waterfall and sky, keeping the two men small on their ledge above a rocky stream.
Crystal Bridges presents the scene as a place where people could feel close to God through nature. The museum also notes that Durand partly invented the view rather than copying a single spot.

Image: Wikimedia Commons · Public domain (PD-Art)