Landscape,

1859

Although regarded with Thomas Cole as a principal founder of the indigenous Hudson River School, which extolled the American wilderness as a portent of national character and promise, Asher Durand did not produce landscapes in earnest until the late 1830s, toward the end of Cole’s brief life. Durand began his career as an engraver, and gravitated first to portraiture before ultimately achieving wide renown as both a theorist and a practitioner of American landscape painting. In 1855, he wrote the influential <em>Letters on Landscape Painting</em>, advocating direct study of nature through meticulous on-site oil sketches that could be combined into more ambitious studio compositions such as <em>Landscape</em>, in which the grandeur of American scenery was invested with allegorical meaning. Adopting in these idealized works compositional techniques codified by Claude Lorrain (1604–1682), including graduated spatial recession via diminishing formal elements and gradational tonal modulation, Durand presented the American wilderness as harmonious and logical, simultaneously suggesting its appeal and availability for productive development. As if to underscore this idea, <em>Landscape</em> incorporates a diminutive but central figure — appropriately attired in red, white, and blue — depicted walking into the inviting scene, much as contemporary Americans envisioned ­occupying the continent.