Durand’s landscapes, like his portraits, showed his training as an engraver in their accurate and minute drawing. Contrary to the general practice of the time, he painted many of his large canvases out of doors in face of nature. His love for nature, combined with his training as an engraver, probably accounts for his almost invariable choice of full midsummer daylight for his pictures, when vegetation was at its fullest and all its details could be minutely seen. Yet, for all his love of detail, he does not lose unity, and the color is true to the soft, warm haze of summer, and the shadows keep their local atmosphere.
Metropolitan Museum of Art
A GLIMPSE OF THE SEA, BY A. H. WYANT
THE HUDSON RIVER SCHOOL
Durand’s landscapes were popular, and there grew up about him a school of painters treating nature much as he did. They loved the country that they visited in their summer excursions, and like him they painted Lake George, the White Mountains, the Hudson, and so there grew up what has been called the Hudson River School. Durand was old when he began painting, and his followers were of a younger generation. Kensett was probably the best of them. He worked less from nature than Durand; his detail has none of Durand’s tranquil thoroughness, and his shadows are apt to be rendered by a facile generalization of brown. However, he made a decided advance over the older master in representing all aspects of nature, all seasons and all times of day, with a special leaning toward sunsets.
A. H. WYANT
Of the others of the school there is space to recall only a few names at random,—Whittredge, McEntee, Bristol, Sandford R. Gifford, Cropsey, and the rest. They were mostly sincere, hard-working painters, and very charming, worthy men personally. They won for themselves a social position in the old New York of the ’60’s and ’70’s greater and more important than any other artistic group has enjoyed in this country. Their paintings were also admired and bought for handsome prices, and as a whole they were prosperous. Time has dealt rather hardly with their fame. Though all of the men whose names have just been cited left works that may still be seen with pleasure, yet as a rule the pictures of the school were thin, laborious, and timid. There was no rich, strong handling of the pigment, no decorative quality to the composition, no massing of light and shade, and no revelation of individual temperament and emotion.