Kindred Spirits
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Kindred Spirits (1849) is perhaps the best known painting of Hudson River School painter Asher Durand. It depicts the recently deceased painter Thomas Cole and his friend the poet William Cullen Bryant in the Catskill Mountains. The landscape, which combines geographical features like Fawns Leap [1] in Kaaterksill Clove and a miniscule depiction of Kaaterskill Falls, is not a literal record of a particular site but an idealized memory of Thomas Cole's discovery of the region more than twenty years prior to the canvases execution.
The painting was commissioned by New York art collector Jonathan Sturges and its title inspired by John Keats' "Sonnet to Solitude". Bryant's daughter Julia donated the painting to the New York Public Library in 1904. In 2005, it was sold at auction to Walmart heiress Alice Walton for $35 million, a record for a painting by an American artist. The Library was criticized for "jettisoning part of the city's cultural patrimony", but the Library defended its move stating it needed the money for its endowment fund. [2]
