The Lay of the Landscape

It may seem lately every time you walk into a museum you see an Asher Durand exhibition. Thirty years ago, we had the Summer of Sam. This year brings us the Summer of Durand. It's hardly a bad thing. After all, Asher Brown Durand (1796—1886) ranks as one in the handful of the greatest American painters. He belongs, with Thomas Cole and Frederic Church, among the big three of the Hudson River School. His works delight in such a way that we do not soon reach the surfeit point.

The Summer of Durand nonetheless brings us small comfort. Yes, we can see "Kindred Spirits" (1849) at the Brooklyn Museum's splendid exhibition ("Kindred Spirits: Asher B. Durand and the American Landscape," through July 29). But of all the paintings in the world, "Kindred Spirits" once belonged to the people of New York, where the New York Public Library once "permanently" displayed the painting — one of the touchstones not of the culture we imported, but of the culture we made, a picture fragrant with our history and our better angels. The library "deaccessioned" the painting out from under us, selling it to Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton for her planned museum in Bentonville, Ark. I lost a lot of my faith in New York when that happened.

We judge a museum by the things it has permanently, not by the shows that pass through. It's nice to see the wonderful paintings that pass through. But we don't get to know them. We get to know the paintings we see frequently. Thankfully, when the Summer of Durand recedes into distant memory, we may continue our acquaintance with many of his paintings. A case in point in the National Academy Museum, which has joined with the Brooklyn Museum and the New-York Historical Society, where "The World of Asher B. Durand: The Artist in Antebellum New York" remains on view through September 30, in this summer's celebration of Durand. "Asher B. Durand (1796–1886), Dean of American Landscape" brings together paintings, prints, sculpture, and manuscripts from the academy's own collections, along with nine landscape paintings by artists other than Durand (including Frederic Church, Albert Bierstadt, and Thomas Moran) on loan from the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, Mass.

It's exactly the kind of show we hope for from the National Academy Museum. The National Academy of Design (which changed its name a few years ago) came into being in 1826; Durand was one of its 15 founding members. For many years, the academy, as a school and place for exhibitions, reigned over the New York art scene. While later eclipsed by the rise of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and other institutions, it nonetheless acquired along the way a fine collection, with works by such masters as Church, Kenyon Cox, Thomas Eakins, Childe Hassam, Leon Kroll, and Albert Pinkham Ryder — and Asher Durand.

The show's highlights include Durand's "The Morning of Life" and "The Evening of Life," both large oil paintings that debuted at the National Academy of Design's annual in 1840. Though he was 44 at the time, Durand had not yet achieved his artistic maturity. These are derivative paintings, not so much of Cole, to whom Durand was inadequately compared at that time, but of Claude Lorrain, the 17th-century French landscape master. The Met, just down Fifth Avenue from the Academy, has Claude's "The Trojan Women Setting Fire to Their Fleet." Its luminescent sky, shadowed foreground, composition, and perspective strike chords very similar to "The Evening of Life." The exuberant trees of both "Morning" and "Evening" evoke other works by Claude.

Durand began as an engraver in his native New Jersey and then in New York City. In the city he studied at the American Academy of Fine Arts (against which the National Academy of Design arose in rebellion), run by John Trumbull. Through the 1820s Durand worked principally as an engraver. In the 1830s, he turned to portrait painting (the New-York Historical Society has Durand's presidential portraits commissioned by Luman Reed), though he also made, in 1835, his most famous engraving, "Ariadne," after John Vanderlyn's 1814 painting in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Included in the Academy show, the engraving reminds us of Durand's mastery of the medium.

Around the time of "Ariadne," however, and inspired by Cole (to whom Durand would pay glorious tribute in "Kindred Spirits"), he turned from both engravings and portrait paintings to landscape painting. "Landscape, Composition, Morning" and "Landscape, Composition, Evening" — the original titles of "The Morning of Life" and "The Evening of Life" — announced his arrival. Derivative though they may be, they also leave no doubt of the self-assured master to come, and they delight entirely on their own. "Landscape with Rocks and Trees," from around 1845, takes us toward what's been called the "Ruskinian exactitude" that informed the mature Durand. Durand the direct observer of nature knew few equals among American painters.

His "Letters on Landscape Painting," promoting Ruskinian views and emphasizing working from nature, appeared in thejournal "The Crayon" in 1855, in the midst of Durand's tenure (1845–61) as president of the National Academy of Design, assuring his status as the "Dean of American Landscape." It's so nice to see the National Academy Museum participating in the Summer of Durand, and it's nice to see "The Morning of Life" and "The Evening of Life" highlighted as crucial works in a brilliant career.

Until January 6 (1083 Fifth Ave. at 89th Street, 212-369-4880).