Depicting America’s Transcendent Landscape

ASHER BROWN DURAND, Kindred Spirits (1849)

The group of writers, artists, poets, and philosophers associated with the transcendentalist movement conceived of nature in ways quite different from those felling trees and digging ditches to build the nation’s economic interests. Entrepreneurs saw nature as an obstacle to overcome. Transcendentalists, by contrast, emphasized humans’ intimate connections to nature. The sublime beauty of the American landscape provided inspiration, transporting individuals to a communion with beauty and truth. The most famous expression of this view of nature came from the brush of Asher B. Durand in Kindred Spirits, a painting that depicts two friends, artist Thomas Cole and poet William Cullen Bryant, standing on a precipice in the Catskills in New York State.

READING AND DISCUSSION QUESTIONS