Kindred Spirits captures some of the spirit and the history of his age. The leading landscape painter Thomas Cole, sketch portfolio under his arm, stands with the celebrated poet William Cullen Bryant on a rocky promontory. The setting is a favorite scene for painters, Kaaterskill Clove.Both painter and poet celebrated nature as the great subject of art and so they are portrayed surrounded by it. Cole, a mentor to Durand, had died in 1848, prompting the picture.
One of the less dramatic painters of the Hudson River School, Durand favored the realistic approach to landscape advocated by the English critic John Ruskin, rather than the metaphorical view held by Cole and other Hudson Riverites that landscape’s representation ought to express God’s sublimity. Obeying Ruskin’s call for truth to nature, Durand explored forest interiors with close attention to the ways of trees, foliage, rocks and ground cover in smaller paintings, while his larger and more elaborate exhibition pictures, influenced by European masters like Claude Lorrain and John Constable, are Arcadian visions suffused with light, color and atmospheric perspective.
