Landscape Painting

Description

In 1855, Asher B. Durand, a founder of the National Academy of Design and a leading member of the Hudson River School, wrote a series of articles for his son s art magazine, The Crayon. The nine articles, Letters on Landscape Painting, outlined Durand s thoughts on learning how to paint landscapes. They are considered by many to be the textbook for the Hudson River School. In the early 1900s, Birge Harrison, a prominent figure in the American Tonalist movement and a director of the landscape school of the Art Students League, gave a series of lectures to the students at the League s summer school in Woodstock, New York. He later compiled those twenty-one lectures into the book, Landscape Painting. Then, as now, the book was considered to be a standard work for students. This volume presents Durand s and Harrison s writings together for the first time. We will never know what each might have thought of their words being combined in such a way, however, over the years hundreds of budding landscape painters and professionals alike have found value in these writings. It only seems fitting that the textbooks of two of America s great landscape painting movements be made available in a single work.