The Kindred Spirits By Asher Brown Durand

A painting by Asher Brown Durand The Kindred Spirits was done in 1949. Asher Brown Durand was part of the painters from the Hudson River School. The artistic work depicts two persons William Cullen Bryant a poet and his friend Thomas Cole a painter that died in 1848. The painting combines a minuscule depiction of Kaaterskill Falls and the geographical characteristics in Katerskill clove. The painting does not literary depict the geography of America (Glueckmarch, 2007, n.p). The painting is rather about the idealized memory of the discovery of Cole of the region over twenty years before he became friends with Bryant, as well as his ideas regarding the nature of America. The artistic work The School of Athens by Raphael, on the other, is a representation of the greatest scientists, mathematicians, and philosophers from a classical antiquity brought together learning and sharing ideas from one other. In a similar way that the artist of the Kindred Spirits combines a minuscule depiction of Kaaterskill Falls and the geographical characteristics in Katerskill clove, the figures in the School of Athens lived at different times, however, are brought together under a single roof. Plato on the left pointing up and Aristotle on the right; the two thinkers
Through the piece, Durand who is a friend of Bryant and Cole depicts his fellows in a companionate stance in a place expressed by both in their artistic pieces. Through carving the names of his friends in paint into the birch tree on the painting’s left side, Durand was able to include the names of the kindred spirits within the landscape. Durand developed a visual record of the relationship between literary circles and the art in the beginning of the nineteenth century by painting Bryant and Cole together in Kindred Spirits. Through painting them together, he was also able to show the common beliefs of the two regarding the American nature and