Asher Brown Durand, Kindred Spirits, 1849, 46.1” x 36.2”, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
This iconic painting by Asher B. Durand depicts the artist’s mentor and close friend, Thomas Cole, the leader of the Hudson River School, in conversation with the poet William Cullen Bryant. The pair stands at a distance from Kaaterskill Falls in a romantic depiction of the Catskill Mountains. When Cole suddenly died in 1848, art collector Jonathan Sturges hired Durand to paint Kindred Spirits as a gift to Bryant to commemorate the subjects’ close friendship and mutual reverence for the American landscape.
If you want to see Kindred Spirits in the flesh, you’ll need to visit the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas. For 100 years, the painting was at the New York Public Library, but in 2005 the Walmart heiress Alice Walton purchased the work of art for her museum for a rumored $35 million.
