Born, Wolfgang: American landscape painting: an interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948)

word. The range of Doughty’s expression
was limited. He was self-taught but not
naive. Although few European originals
of old masters and contemporary paint-
ers were then in America, enough prints
were accessible to make a painter, espe-
cially in a cultural center as varied as
Philadelphia, familiar with the style of
outstanding foreign artists, In the con-
ventional compositions of Doughty, with
their repoussoirs and groups of trees
forming naturally grown monuments, the
ideal landscape of Claude and Gaspard
Poussin survives, however much diluted
(Fig. 24). Doughty’s technique is sum-
mary. He glosses over the more vigorous
characteristics of nature in favor of a
“genteel,” feminine charm. His was a
parlor romanticism. He painted a some-
what stage-like lake enclosed by moun-
tains, with a tiny figure seen from the
back which seems to view the landscape
with awe, and he called the composition
In Nature’s Wonderland. In his later
years he must have studied Ruisdael,
for in 1846 he painted a landscape with a
Roman bridge and ruins which is a copy
of one of the great Dutch master's pic-
tures in the Louvre."® This landscape is
now in the Brooklyn Museum. Although
lauded at first, Doughty outlived his
early success; and he died, disillusioned
and poor, in 1856, long before a new gen-
eration looked at him again with sympa-
thetic eyes.

The step from a summarily grasped
and traditionally treated landscape to an
authentic study of a given locality was
made by Asher B. Durand."” Durand was
born of Huguenot stock in 1796. The son
of a painter, he was trained as an en-
graver, but as early as 1817 attended
classes at the American Academy of
Arts, and gradually devoted more and
more time to painting until he gave up

engraving in 1839 to become a profes-
sional portrait and landscape painter. A
wealthy merchant in New York, Luman
Reed, had encouraged him in his devel-
opment as a painter. Reed was the first
collector in America who patronized con-
temporary American art on a large scale.
It was a severe loss for the young painters
when he died in 1836, but evidently his
example bore fruit. Other men of means
and discriminating taste took an interest
in the development of American art. Du-
rand found a new patron in Reeds
younger partner, Jonathan Sturges, and,
although he painted landscapes in pref-
erence to the more highly valued fields
of the portrait and genre, he was made
President of the National Academy of
Design in 1845, which in the twenty
years since it was founded had devel-
oped into the central agency of Ameri-
can art life. Durand held this office until
1861.

In his middle years Durand traveled in
Europe, visited London and Paris and
stayed in Rome for a winter. His reaction
to Europe was in keeping with the ro-
mantic pattern: he was enthusiastic over
Rembrandt, Rubens, Murillo, and Van
Dyck, and, with qualifications, over
Claude Lorrain and Salvator Rosa, was
disgusted with Jacques-Louis David, the
classicist, and his school, and was most
impressed by the “picturesque” nature of
the Rhine Valley and the Swiss Alps.

Durand's pictures, like those of his
Swiss contemporary Alexander Calame,
are reminiscent of Ruisdael: rugged
trees with knotty branches form the
wings of a prospect enlivened by a cas-
cade; sunlight breaks though the green
network of foliage and plays on mossy
rocks. Rustic people are distributed in
the picture space so as to emphasize its
depth, but they are not emotional focal