Main content
Art of the Americas to World War I
Course: Art of the Americas to World War I > Unit 7
Lesson 5: Realism in the United States- Becoming a city: daily life in 1820, Brooklyn
- John Wesley Jarvis, Black Hawk and His Son Whirling Thunder
- Mount, Bargaining for a Horse
- John James Audubon, The Wild Turkey
- Asher B. Durand, Kindred Spirits
- Richard Caton Woodville, War News from Mexico
- Before the Civil War, the Mexican-American War as prelude
- Face to face with the voters: Bingham's Country Politician
- Frederic Church, The Natural Bridge, Virginia
- Blythe, Justice
- Martyr or murderer? Hovenden's The Last Moments of John Brown
- The Civil War: putting Liberty front and center
- Johnson, A Ride for Liberty -- The Fugitive Slaves
- Mending America, women and the Civil War
- Cotton, oil, and the economics of history
- Eakins, The Champion Single Sculls (Max Schmitt in a Single Scull)
- Heroes of modern surgery: Eakins' Dr. Gross and Dr. Agnew
- Eakins, The Gross Clinic
- The U.S. Civil War, sharpshooters, and Winslow Homer
- Winslow Homer, Army Teamsters
- Winslow Homer, Taking Sunflower to Teacher
- Homer, The Life Line
- Homer, The Fog Warning (Halibut Fishing)
- Homer, Northeaster
- Brown, View of the Lower Falls, Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone
- The closing of the frontier and The Fall of the Cowboy
- The Radical Floriography of Sarah Mapps Douglass
© 2023 Khan AcademyTerms of usePrivacy PolicyCookie Notice
Asher B. Durand, Kindred Spirits
Asher B. Durand, Kindred Spirits, 1849, oil on canvas, 111.8 x 91.4 cm (Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art) . A conversation with Dr. Mindy Besaw, Curator, American Art and Director of Fellowships and Research, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and Dr. Steven Zucker. Created by Smarthistory.
Video transcript
(soft piano music) - [Narrator 1] We're at
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, looking at one of the most famous, one of the most recognized
paintings in American history. This is by Asher B. Durand. It's called Kindred Spirits. - [Narrator 2] The figures
are William Cullen Bryant, the poet, and with him is Thomas Cole. William Cullen Bryant was
asked to give the speech in the memorial service for
Cole after he had passed. - [Narrator 1] These
men were good friends, and in fact, Jonathan Sturges, the man who commissioned this portrait, was also quite close to both of them. So this is a very private painting. - [Narrator 2] There are lots of things that remind us of the
importance of the Catskills and there are lots of
things that we could unpack for this canonical story of American art. So one of those is Thomas Cole as the so-called founder of the
American School of Painting. - [Narrator 1] So let's unpack this term, Hudson River School, for a moment. Thomas Cole famously
went up the Hudson River, north of New York City, to this ancient mountain range, an area that was still very rural and began to paint it often with a deep spirituality
embedded in the landscape. And this interest in
finding this rugged terrain was a direct consequence of the fact that New York City was
growing at an enormous pace. By the time that this is painted by the end of Cole's life, in 1849, New York City had
become the primary city on the east coast of the United States. - [Narrator 2] For Cole,
he very directly says, "the wilderness is that
place to speak to God," but Durand instead he
sees nature as a studio for the artists. But there is a difference in the way Durand thinks
about it than Cole. - [Narrator 1] For most of
Durand's painting career, he had been using a much more
traditional method borrowed from the European, which
is to sketch outside and then to go back to the studio and to create invented compositions. But here we're seeing a distinct change and that may be in part
a kind of homage to Cole but also responding to a
new interest in realism, a fidelity to the geology of these rocks, to the specificity of
this incredible bough and the foliage as it arks
across the top of this painting. - [Narrator 2] There's
something so delightful about how the sun reflects
on the shoulders of the men, and then every little leaf on
the tree in the foreground, and then it goes back into that wonderful
atmospheric perspective and those shades of blue. And some of the delightful
details in this is the fern and the foreground, the moss on the rock. Look at the chipping away
the bark on the trees. All of those details convince the viewer that they're sanding in
this gorge with these men. But we have to remember that the artists are translating
landscape for the viewer. The blasted tree in the foreground, that's a direct reference to Cole and it's also his life cut short. Cole died suddenly. He was still a young man. - [Narrator 1] And yet
the men are standing on this ancient rock
that is covered with moss and it speaks to a kind of agelessness. And so there is this idea
of the eternity of nature as a kind of solace for
the loss of this man. The title, Kindred Spirits,
references a phrase in a poem by the English romantic
poet, John Keats' titled, "O Solitude". - [Narrator 2] "In my soul's pleasure; and it sure must be almost the
highest bliss of human-kind, when to thy haunts two
kindred spirits flee." - [Narrator 1] The very
beginning of the poem, there is a reference to
this historical moment where Keats is saying,
"If I must be alone, it shouldn't be among the
murky buildings of the city, and instead climb with me the
steep nature's observatory", that is going out into the wilderness in a place that I think
for all of these men, inherently more spiritual. It is such a lovely idea
to commission a painting as a memory of a friend, and that a painting like this that captures such an
intimate relationship can become such a public
statement about American art. - [Narrator 2] For many of our visitors who maybe haven't visited the Catskills, there's something familiar about this because it looks a lot like the Ozarks. Perhaps that's also the
success of the painting, is that it can overlay and feel specific to many different viewers at many different times and in many different places. (soft piano music)