Kindred Spirits, 1849 by Asher Brown Durand Thank You Card

Asher Brown Durand - Kindred Spirits, 1849. Asher Brown Durand (1796-1886) was an American painter of the Hudson River School. "Kindred Spirits" depicts the painter Thomas Cole, who had died in 1848, and his friend, the poet William Cullen Bryant, in the Catskill Mountains. The landscape painting, which combines geographical features in Kaaterskill Clove and a minuscule depiction of Kaaterskill Falls, is not a literal depiction of American geography. Rather, it is an idealised memory of Cole's discovery of the region more than twenty years prior, his friendship with Bryant, and his ideas about American nature.