 |
|
| DAN SEALS |
 | There once was an old man of Esser, Whose knowledge grew lesser and lesser, It at last grew so small He knew nothing at all, And now he's a college professor. |
 |
| Asher Brown Durand, the eighth of eleven children, was born in Jefferson Village (now Maplewood), New Jersey. His frail health exempted him from working on the family farm; instead, he helped his father--a watchmaker and silversmith.
Following an apprenticeship to engraver Peter Maverick from 1812 to 1817, Durand entered into full partnership with Maverick and ran the New York branch of the Newark-based firm. The partnership dissolved in 1820 in a dispute concerning Durand's acceptance of John Trumbull's commission to engrave The Declaration of Independence, which Durand had apparently taken on without deferring to Maverick's position as senior partner. (Maverick, who interpreted the act as a violation of their partnership agreement, heatedly accused Durand of trying to sabotage his career.) The completion of the work in 1823 established Durand's reputation as one of the country's finest engravers. An active member of the New York art community, Durand was instrumental in organizing the New-York Drawing Association in 1825 (later the National Academy of Design, which he served as president from 1845 to 1861) and the Sketch Club in 1829 (later the Century Association). During the late 1820s and early 1830s, when his interest gradually shifted from engraving to oil painting, he demonstrated a growing competence in portraiture and genre subjects. With the encouragement of his friend and patron Luman Reed, Durand ended his engraving career in 1835. |
 |
| The Trysting Tree |
| Among Durand's last major landscapes, The Trysting Tree was commissioned by Benjamin Hazard Field, a wealthy merchant, as a gift for his wife, Catherine M. Van Cortlandt de Peyster, on their thirtieth wedding anniversary. The painting was intended to illustrate a verse by Field to her. Inscribed on the frame, the poem accompanied the painting when it was exhibited at the National Academy of Design in 1869.
It was not unusual for Durand to accept a landscape commission in which setting and various details were stipulated by the patron. He enhanced Field's memory image of thirty years by setting the courting couple, moon, clouds, and the shores of a winding Hudson River into the type of landscape in vogue when both he and his patron were young men by reverting to the classical landscape formula of seventeenth-century French painter Claude Lorrain, on which he had frequently relied thirty years earlier. During the 1860s, Durand occasionally created landscapes in which such older formulas reappear. The evidence of The Trysting Tree suggested that he did so with a specific purpose in mind. Durand applied the Clandean formula: a tree framing a shadowy foreground, a body of water in the middle, ground, low hills in the distance, and golden light suffusing the sky and reflected in the water. Into this Durand injected the rougher characteristics of Hudson River scenery: bare, rugged hills, choppy dark water, unkempt foliage. He then added two of his own early signatures--the gnarled tree dominating the foreground and backlit with a glowing sky. |
| In 1837, a sketching expedition to Schroon Lake in the Adirondacks with his close friend Thomas Cole seems to have determined Durand's decision to concentrate on landscape painting. In 1840, with money advanced by Jonathan Sturges, Reed's son-in-law and business partner, Durand embarked on a two-year European Grand Tour, part of which was spent in the company of the artists John Casilear, John Kensett, and Thomas Rossiter.
Durand's annual summer sketching trips in the Catskill, Adirondack, and White mountains yielded hundreds of drawings and oil sketches that he later incorporated into finished academy pieces. These are the embodiment of his Hudson River School style. With the death of Cole in 1848 Durand was recognized as the leader of American landscape painting. He died on the family property in Maplewood, to which he had retired from active professional life in 1869. |
 |
 |
| No. 95. View of Konodai and the Tone River
From the heights of Konodai, a site fortified by a series of military barons in the medieval period, Mount Fuji is clearly prominent in the distance. This long bluff along the eastern side of the Tone, now the Edogawa, River is the first high ground of any sort east of the Sumida River, allowing an uninterrupted panorama to the southwest over the seven-mile interval of flat delta area stretching out to Fuji. |
|
What is a jagger or jagging wheel?
???
PASS YOUR MOUSE OVER THE QUESTION MARKS FOR THE ANSWER! |
 | |
| Cambridge University Botanic Garden Location: Bateman Street, Cambridge, CB2 1JF Cambridgeshire, England | |
 | |
| Hare | |
| Crossing the Rocky Mountains in August and September of 1805 was the Corps of Discovery's toughest ordeal. They had pushed, pulled, and paddled themselves up the Missouri River. They had survived the bitterest winter of their lives in 1804 in present-day North Dakota. But nothing prepared them for the Bitterroot Mountains--not even the warnings of a Shoshone chief. |
| PLEASE NOTE: The terms "Bitterroots" and "Rockies" in this section are used interchangeably. The Bitterroot Mountains are a range of the Rocky Mountains. |
 |
| Headwaters of the Missouri River at Three Forks, Montana |
| The principal headwaters of the Missouri are the Jefferson, Madison, and Gallatin rivers, which rise high in the Rocky Mountains in southwestern Montana, and join to form the Missouri near Three Forks, Montana (at the cliff in center background of photo). These rivers were named after President Jefferson, Secretary of State (and later President) James Madison, and Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin, all of whom played significant roles in the Louisiana Purchase and the Lewis and Clark Expedition itself.
William Clark was the first white man to see this "essential point in the geography of this western part of the Continent". . . July 25, 1805. It was in this area where the Corps of Discovery had their famous meeting with the Shoshone chief, Cameahwait, Sacagawea's brother. This is where Sacagawea was born; however, she was captured by a Hidatsa war party and taken to what is now North Dakota. At Fort Mandan, Sacagawea and Toussaint Charbonneau joined up with the Corps. |
 |
| This 1918 canvas by Montana's Cowboy Artist Charles Russell memorializes the Corps' meeting with Cameahwait's war party. (Cameahwait was Sacagawea's brother.) Leaving his gun behind with two Corps members, Lewis advanced with only the American flag. His ploy worked: "We wer all carresed and besmeared with their grease and paint till I was heartily tired of the national hug," he wrote. |
 |
| Another depiction of the meeting with Cameahwait. Notice the Indians touching Clark's slave York. They had never seen a black man. Lewis is about to be besmeared by Cameahwait; Clark (the red-haired one) is behind him; and Sacagawea is behind Clark with her infant. |
| They met Chief Cameahwait in August of 1805, near the three forks of the Missouri River in present-day Montana. He told them that "rocks so closely hemned in the river that there was no possibilyte of passing along the shore. . . That the mountains were also inaccessible to man or horse." But the men remained confident. |
 |
| Mountains "as steep as the roof of a house," one of the men wrote of the Bitterroots. Buttressing the boundary between present-day Montana and Idaho, they created an unexpected, 300-mile-long barrier that rose to heights of 11,000 feet and more. Spotting the Rockies from Lemhi Pass, Lewis was nonplussed but stoic. "I discovered immence ranges of high mountains still to the West of us," he recorded, "with their tops partially covered with snow." |
| Shortly after the meeting with Cameahwait, when the Rockies first came into view, the team expressed joy. "These points of the Rocky Mountains were covered with snow and the sun shone on it in such manner as to give me the most plain and satisfactory view," wrote Meriwether Lewis. But the sight was concerning, too. As beautiful as it was, that snow meant they had to hurry; spending a winter in the mountains could prove disastrous. |
 |
| Crossing the Bitterroot Mountains after an early September snowfall, the Corps battled hellishly steep terrain made more difficult by the wet and cold. With no food for themselves or their horses, they were forced to kill and eat three colts. "We suffered everything Cold, Hunger & Fatigue could impart," Lewis later recalled of the torturous 11-day-long forced march across this remote range of the Rocky Mountains. |
| The mountain terrain was, indeed, nearly impassable. Horses they had obtained from the Shoshone struggled with each step. Then came rain, hail, and snow, making travel even more treacherous. Finally, the lack of food, save berries and the occasional grouse, made the men weak with hunger. On September 21, 1805, their relief at "having tryumphed over the rocky Mountains" was clear. They descended to the western plains, "a level and fertile country w[h]ere there was every rational hope of finding a comfortable subsistence."
Lewis and Clark, along with their men and Indian guides, stumbled out of the Bitterroot Mountains hungry, frostbitten, and barely alive. The Indians they encountered, the Nez Perce, helped the Corps of Discovery recover from their trip over the mountains. |
 |
| "Leavel pine Countrey" |
| Descending the Bitterroots to a "leavel pine Countrey," Clark led an advance party "to a Small Plain in which I found maney Indian lodges." While Lewis and others recovered, the ever robust Clark moved downriver on the Clearwater (above), where he had discovered "fine timber for Canoes." Hollowing Ponderosa pine trunks by burning them over a slow fire, Indian style, Clark prepared for the next leg of the journey--the race to the Pacific. |
 |
| Frequent visitors to the Telling place Ann Telling Photo |
| DISCLAIMER: Please understand that I do not write the articles that appear in these pages. Only those photographs specifically designated as Ann Telling photos were taken by me. All others were gathered from other sources. |
