To Delineate Painting from Poem:
Asher B. Durand’s
Landscape—A Scene from “Thanatopsis”

American cultural movements intertwine all aspects of the nation’s society: art, literature and architecture, philosophy and music—particularly the former two. Art and literature are constantly entwined, exemplifying one another and their own fields. Regarding American cultural movements, such as American Romanticism, significant individuals become familiar with one another’s work, resulting in inspiration that leads to creative works that pay homage to another artist’s work. Asher B. Durand’s Landscape—A Scene from “Thanatopsis,” inspired by Romantic poet William Cullen Bryant, exemplifies artist familiarity that results in multifaceted cultural creations. Both Bryant and Durand hail from the American Romantic movement, which emphasized nature as a source of refuge and rest, knowledge, and religious revelation. The painting has yet to be investigated beyond a visualization of Bryant’s work, illustrated by many reviews contemporary of 1850 as well as current scholarship. A deeper exploration of Durand’s work provides insight regarding prevalent creative themes of the current world of arts, as well as a look into Durand’s most honest inspiration as an artist. Though creating separate works—that must remain distinguishable for proper analysis of either work—Bryant and Durand investigated the themes of man and nature, individualism and the inner and after lives. Through detailing natural elements that emphasize the life cycle, Durand creates literary art that pays tribute to William Cullen Bryant’s Thanatopsis and to the American Romanticism movement.
Asher B. Durand lived a highly successful six-decade career that “spanned the rise, dominance and eclipse” of landscape painting as a national enterprise. As a leading member of the art association known as the Hudson River School, Durand played a part in the founding of the National Academy of Design and later succeeded Samuel F. B. Morse as its president. Durand dedicated his attention to landscape painting, even in his early days as an artist in his engraving apprenticeship. In 1830, he collaborated as engraver and painter with the William Cullen Bryant on a work entitled The American Landscape, a collection of plates made after landscape paintings. The six plates Durand created accompanied six verses of Bryant’s prose, not unlike Scene from “Thanatopsis.” In addition to Bryant, Durand was also associated with other significant figures of the American Romantic movement in creative arts. Through a shared patron, Luman Reed, Durand became associated with American Romantic artist Thomas Cole. After the passing of Reed, Durand and Cole came into continual contact with one another, leading to a life-long friendship between the two landscape artists. The two urged one another to improve their landscapes and seek truths regarding nature, spirituality and art. Durand attended Cole’s landmark lecture on American Scenery in 1835, which emphasized the integral place of landscape painting in the hierarchy of art genres. As creators of a similar genre of painting, Durand and Cole were constantly inspired by the other’s style, leading to similarities in the artists’ work. Their landscapes had constantly been compared, “Cole’s, the heroic and wilderness sublime’ and Durand, the domestic [and] pastoral.” Furthermore, Durand learned and acquired the plein air technique—setting up art equipment outside within the subject matter—from Cole through an exhibition the two took together in order to experiment in the new technique. This influence on Cole dramatically altered Durand’s view of nature and his responsibility to portray it. After the exhibition with Cole, Durand claimed, “[g]o first to Nature to learn to paint the landscape.” The unexpected death of Thomas Cole on February 8, 1848 rattled the art world, especially Durand. After Cole’s death, Durand was passed the torch as the leading landscape painter of the mid-nineteenth century. After Cole’s sublime paintings detailing all-powerful nature, the art world was faced with Durand’s painted pastoral.
Though Durand differed from Cole in his presenting of nature, Durand and Cole were both leaders in allegorical and literary paintings, as well as the Romantic theme of human life. Three years prior to Cole’s death, Durand created a painting entitled “Landscape Composition, An Old Man’s Reminiscences.” The painting drew inspiration from poetry by Oliver Goldsmith, an Anglo-Irish writer of the mid-18th century. Not unlike Cole’s famous Voyage of Life, Durand’s 1845 painting presents the “stages of life as naturalized vignettes,” though in a domesticated rural landscape as compared to Cole’s sublime canvases of the formidable natural world. While Cole’s Voyage of Life connects a single man’s life through four allegorical paintings representing birth, youth, adulthood and old-age, Durand’s connects the life stages of a single man through a single canvas detailing an old man reminiscing about his younger years. Both works, however, symbolically represent the Romantic theme of the human life. Many of Durand’s works often focused on the subject of human life—not so much the human condition as later realist artists would detail, but rather how human life is connected to all other life through a single connecting force. The life force and the theme of the life cycle characterized the American Romantic movement, launched by the spiritually philosophic poetry of William Cullen Bryant.
Bryant’s Thanatopsis deals with the lofty subject of the interconnectedness of all things, illustrating it as highly Romantic. The poem pleads for a higher sense of meaning beyond individual experience, thus also focusing on the Romantic motif of individuality merged with a higher power. Bryant poses the daunting question, “What happens after we die?” but softens it through speaking of the power of nature. Bryant attempts to soothe the worry over death by telling the reader to listen to the voice of nature that tells us that when we die, we are not alone, for we will mix back into the Earth; we will not be alone after death. In both of its 1850 exhibitions with the National Academy of Design (NAD) and the Art Union, Durand’s Scene from “Thanatopsis” was displayed alongside lines 38-45 of Bryant’s “Thanatopsis:”
“Rock-ribb'd and ancient as the sun,--the vales 

Stretching in pensive quietness between;
The vernal woods--rivers that move
In majesty, and the complaining brooks
That make the meadows green; and pour'd round all,
Old ocean's grey and melancholy waste,--
Are but the solemn decorations all
Of the great tomb of man.”

These verses speak of the earth, of great nature, as the “great tomb of man,” that we all must return to after life. The “great tomb” refers to the interconnectedness of nature; all life converges after death, only to regenerate again, abiding by the cycle of life. Durand’s interpretation, his Scene, is inspired—not copied—from these seven lines of the poem. Durand details Bryant’s “tomb of man” through an imaginative landscape. Bryant had “mediated on the eternal cycles of nature as a moral comfort for man facing the inevitability of death,” a theme that spoke to and comforted Durand two years after the passing of Thomas Cole. Cole’s death sparked Durand to return to large philosophical landscapes, taking after, and perhaps honoring, his companion. Scene from “Thanatopsis” is indeed more allegorical than his earlier work. The painting epitomizes the themes of both Bryant’s poem and the Romantic movement. The theme of the cycle of life is illustrated through individual visual elements of the painting representing stages of life, such as the winding river leading to a greater body of water, symbolizing the ceaselessness and connectedness of life. The painting is a sunrise scene over a lush landscape, seemingly enveloped in greenery and life. The fresh, dewy fertility radiated through the painting emits a springtime environment, representing new life. A farmer tills his fertile soil and the sheep have yet to be shorn of their abundant winter wool. The sheep, middle-aged plowman and full, grassy meadows are bathed in a golden light, symbolizing fruitful youth and adulthood. Whereas the left side of the painting emits golden rays and fruitful scenery, the right side grows darker under the forest of ancient winding trees and perilous crags—deathly imagery and motifs. In the mid-ground, directly under the largest of the mountain peaks, is a funeral and burial of a recently passed human (perhaps Durand is memorializing Cole through this funeral).
However, Durand does not end his allegory of life at death, but rather its continuance. Durand details the burial of the deceased, and in the foreground before the burial is a cemetery, signaling that the deceased have returned to the earth. This point is furthered by the cemetery being overgrown with the moss, vines and other greenery; as man has returned to earth, he becomes one with nature, symbolizing the insurmountable forces of interconnectedness. In this way, Durand has literally illustrated the allegorical “great tomb of man” as Earth. The depicting of the burial, the farmer’s plowing, and of the ancient ruins of man in equally ancient nature reflects Bryant’s emphasis on the perpetuity of the earth, as well as the creation and reversion of the human from and back to its soils. The tilling and the burial both speak to the penetrability of the earth, heeding the life cycle motif; life comes from the earth and returns to it after death.
“Thanatopsis,” in addition to speaking of the connecting force of nature, speaks on the existent immortality of all things, heeding the religious aspects of Romanticism. Durand presents the theme of immortality principally through the architectural structures contained in the right side of the painting. The painting contains both a castle and a cathedral, the right-most structure. There are a few differing interpretations of what each structure symbolizes. The castle on the cliff overlooking the landscape in its entirety has the potential to symbolize heaven; immersed in the bright sunshine of morning, the castle rises directly above the burial, symbolizing the spiritual afterlife that grants immortality to the departed. Generally in literature and art, the castle symbolizes spiritual power and safety, additionally heeding the castle as a source of an immortality motif in Durand’s painting. However, different theories can been posed. While a majority of the scenery in Scene from “Thanatopsis” parallels verses of the poem, the forest and cathedral does not, and could have been inspired by Bryant’s later work A Forest Hymn of 1825, in which “the forest is described in terms of a cathedral—‘vernerable columns,’ ‘dim vaults,’ ‘winding aisles’—and made to serve a symbol of immortality. The cathedral ties in the religious overtones of the Romantic movement, commenting on the spirituality that all life shares and is directed through. Literarily, the cathedral has represented paradise, thus linking the symbolism of both structures through themes of immortality. While there can be arguments for several significant directionalities of the painting, a lateral directionality from left to right appears to be most noteworthy. When each individual aspect of the painting is threaded together within Durand’s landscape, the cycle of life can be visualized from left to right. The right side of the painting connects back to the left through the ruins in the bottom left corner that are overgrown with the new spring vegetation, thus completing the cycle.
Reviews contemporary to the painting’s 1850 exhibitions reveal a difficulty concerning its relation to the well-known and well-regarded poem. Unfortunately based on three principal reviews from the National Academy of Design and the Kinckerbocker and Albion art journals, the deciding question determining either a positive or negative review was: “How successful was the painting at visualizing the poem?” Durand chose to associate his work directly with that of Bryant, resulting in an inevitable comparison between the two that subsequently affects the critiques of the work. For example, the NAD review claims the painting cannot explain itself, and that without the “key afforded by the lines” of the poem printed alongside the painting,” the work could “hardly be understood.” Similarly, the Albion claimed that the notable visual aspects of the painting could hardly be recognized without the “textual description” provided alongside. The latter of the two reviews deprives both the poem and the painting of their deeper meanings; the painting needs a written narrative, and the poem is simply a description for another work. Additionally, little pertinent modern-day scholarship of the painting is present; Scene from “Thanatopsis” maintains its position in scholarship and critiques as a sheer visualization of Bryant’s poem. While the physical display of the painting and poem excerpt undoubtedly cause a link to be created between the two, the works and their purposes must be differentiated in order to allow proper critique. Indeed, Durand intended for the link—the title is unmistakable—but the painting contains symbols not provided in the displayed text, and it maintains other purposes than the poem. The castle and cathedral are not mentioned in the text, potentially calling for the Albion to claim they “become of no importance.”
Regarding the purpose of the painting, it would be unfitting to claim that Durand did not intend to paint the work after the poem. However, after a string of Hudson River School paintings dedicated to Cole (i.e. Frederic Edwin Church’s To the Memory of Cole), there is potential for the painting to be a memorial to the recently-deceased painter. Scene from “Thanatopsis” contains several motifs made relevant to the art world by Thomas Cole. The unshorn sheep, the continuously flowing body of water, the looming curved mountain crag, and the warm sunrise sky dusted with clouds recalls Cole’s paintings, specifically The Arcadian State of the Course of Empire series. The theme of Thanatopsis and the symbols presented in the painting deal with immortality. Durand presents a painting that immortalizes Cole and his work. This purpose illuminates the work as not merely a copy of Bryant’s poem, but a more complex piece of work that deserves critiques and scholarship that honor the painting’s distinctive place in the art world. Though during both its exhibitions in 1850, the presentation of Asher B. Durand’s Landscape—A Scene from Thanatopsis begged for the work to be seen as an artistic version or painting of William Cullen Bryant’s Thanatopsis, the work should rather be viewed and analyzed as a separate work—a visualization of American Romanticism, not simply Bryant’s poem. The two epitomize cultural sharing amongst Romantic figureheads in nineteenth century America; there is no arguing that Durand has created a landscape based off of Thanatopsis. The Cole-esque painting includes details that are present in Thanatopsis (“vernal woods,” “rivers…and complaining brooks,” “meadows green [and] old ocean’s grey,” “a pensive quietness), but also takes on the broader motif of Bryant’s work: the “great tomb of man.” Durand illustrates the life cycle and how all life is essentially immortal—born from the earth and destined to return to it.

Illustrations

Asher B. Durand, Landscape-A Scene from Thanatopsis, 1850. Oil, 39 1/2 x 61 in. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY.

Detail Asher B. Durand, Landscape-A Scene from Thanatopsis, 1850. Oil, 39 1/2 x 61 in. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Detail Asher B. Durand, Landscape-A Scene from Thanatopsis, 1850. Oil, 39 1/2 x 61 in. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Detail Asher B. Durand, Landscape-A Scene from Thanatopsis, 1850. Oil, 39 1/2 x 61 in. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY

Thomas Cole, The Arcadian State, 1836. Oil, 39 1/2 x 63 1/2 in. New York Historical Society, New York, NY
Thomas Cole, The Arcadian State, 1836. Oil, 39 1/2 x 63 1/2 in. New York Historical Society, New York, NY

End Notes

1. Linda S. Ferber, Kindred Spirits: Asher B. Durand and the American Landscape, (New York, NY: Brooklyn Museum, 2007), chap. 5: Asher B. Durand, American Landscape Painter.

2. Linda S. Ferber

3. Sandra L. Langer, "The Aesthetics of Democracy," Art Journal, 39, no. 2 (1979-1980): 132-135, http://www.jstor.org/stable/776399 (accessed November 28, 2012).

4. Linda S. Ferber

5. Sandra L. Langer

6. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, "Landscape—Scene from "Thanatopsis," 1850 Asher B. Durand (American, 1796–1886) Oil on canvas." Last modified 2012. Accessed November 28, 2012. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/11.156.

7. The Metropolitan Museum of Art

8. A.B. Durand: 1796-1886, (Newark, NJ: Montclair Art Museum, 1971), 60, 96.

9. David B. Lawall, Asher B. Durand: A Documentary Catalogue of the Narrative and Landscape Paintings, (New York, NY: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1978), 81-83.

10. David B. Lawall

11. David B. Lawall

Bibliography

A.B. Durand: 1796-1886. Newark, NJ: Montclair Art Museum, 1971.

Asher B. Durand, Landscape-A Scene from Thanatopsis, 1850. Oil, 39 1/2 x 61 in. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY

Ferber, Linda S. Kindred Spirits: Asher B. Durand and the American Landscape. New York, NY: Brooklyn Museum, 2007.

Gardner, Helen, Fred S. Kleiner, and Christin J. Mamiya. Art Through the Ages. Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt College, 2004.

Langer, Sandra L. "The Aesthetics of Democracy." Art Journal. 39. no. 2 (1979-1980): 132-135. http://www.jstor.org/stable/776399 (accessed November 28, 2012).

Lawall, David B. Asher B. Durand: A Documentary Catalogue of the Narrative and Landscape Paintings. New York, NY: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1978.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, "Landscape—Scene from "Thanatopsis," 1850 Asher B. Durand (American, 1796–1886) Oil on canvas." Last modified 2012. Accessed November 28, 2012. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/11.156.

Sweet, Frederick A. "The Hudson River School and the Early American Landscape Tradition." Bulletin of the Art Institute of Chicago. 39. no. 2 (1945): 18-24. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4116901 (accessed November 28, 2012).

Thomas Cole, The Arcadian State, 1836. Oil, 39 1/2 x 63 1/2 in. New York Historical Society, New York, NY