On view
American Art
Wilmerding Pavilion
Philip & Nancy Anschutz Gallery
Wilmerding Pavilion
Philip & Nancy Anschutz Gallery
Kaaterskill Landscape,
1850
Asher B. Durand, 1796–1886; born Jefferson, NJ; died Maplewood, NJ
y1946-104
Regarded as the leading American landscape painter when he produced this image, Durand wrote the influential Letters on Landscape Painting (1855), which advocates meticulous oil sketches such as this. These sketches could later be combined into more ambitious compositions celebrating the grandeur of American scenery. Here Durand focused on an unassuming swath of rocks and woodland, rendered with exacting attention to highly detailed forms, whose textured surfaces suggest the passage of time and infuse the landscape with a sense of its own history.
Information
Title
Kaaterskill Landscape
Dates
1850
Maker
Medium
Oil on canvas
Dimensions
54 × 44 cm (21 1/4 × 17 5/16 in.)
frame: 77.2 × 67.3 × 8.6 cm (30 3/8 × 26 1/2 × 3 3/8 in.)
Credit Line
Museum purchase, John Maclean Magie, Class of 1892, and Gertrude Magie Fund
Object Number
y1946-104
Place Depicted
North America, United States, New York, Catskill Mountains
Signatures
Signed, lower right: ABD; date, 1850, added later in graphite.
Culture
Type
Subject
[Robert C. Vose, Boston (MA), by September 7, 1946 [1]]; purchased by the Princeton University Art Museum, October 31, 1946. [1] Letter from Donald D. Egbert to Robert C. Vose, September 7, 1946.
- D.D. Egbert, "Three landscapes by American artists", Record of the Museum of Historic Art, Princeton University 5, no. 2 (1946): p. 4-5., p. 4; fig. 1
- Allen Rosenbaum and Francis F. Jones, Selections from The Art Museum, Princeton University, (Princeton, NJ: The Art Museum, Princeton University, 1986), p. 29 (illus.)
- Princeton University Art Museum: Handbook of the Collection (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 65 (illus.)
- Princeton University Art Museum: Handbook of the Collections (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Art Museum, 2013), p. 65
