Artist
Asher Brown Durand
American, 1796–1886
Asher Brown Durand was an American Hudson River School painter. 43 works are cataloged here, principally at Metropolitan Museum of Art, most of them oil paintings. Asher Brown Durand was born in Maplewood.
Asher Brown Durand spent his life in the rolling hills of New Jersey, where the forests and farmland shaped his quiet, deliberate way of seeing. He started out as an engraver, carving images onto metal plates for books and banknotes, but by his 40s he’d traded the burin for a paintbrush, drawn to the way light played across leaves and rocks.
What sticks about Durand is his late, fierce love for nature. He walked the same paths again and again, sketching trees and streams in pencil before turning them into oil paintings back in his studio. Friends said he often talked to the trees while he worked, as if listening for their secrets.
Look for the way he layered leaves: each branch is built up from dozens of tiny strokes that catch the light just so, a technique called cross-hatching. His trees never look stiff, they sway, breathe, and fill the canvas with real woodsy air. If you’ve ever stood in a sunlit grove and felt the world slow down, that’s Durand’s gift on canvas.
Works by Asher Brown Durand
High Point: Shandaken Mountains
Pastoral Landscape
Summer Afternoon
A Pastoral Scene
The Beeches
River Scene
Landscape—Scene from "Thanatopsis"
Ariadne
Trees on a Rocky Hillside
Jonathan Sturges
Mrs. Winfield Scott
In the Woods
Luman Reed
Forest in the Morning Light
View of New York from New Jersey
The Stranded Ship
Gouverneur Kemble
Forest Stream with Vista
The First Harvest in the Wilderness
Collections represented
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