Asher Brown Durand

Durand was born on August 21, 1796, in Jefferson Village, New Jersey, an area later renamed Maplewood. He trained first with his father, a watchmaker and silversmith, then apprenticed to the Newark engraver Peter Maverick from 1812 to 1817. He and Maverick opened a New York branch of the engraving business, and it was in this period that Durand produced his best known engraving, after John Trumbull's painting The Declaration of Independence, now at the Yale University Art Gallery.

Around 1818 Durand began attending drawing classes and drawing from plaster casts at the American Academy of Fine Arts in New York, also reportedly attending the anatomical lectures of Dr. Wright Post. He shifted his focus increasingly toward painting through the 1830s. He was a co-founder, in 1825, of the association that became the National Academy of Design, and he served as its president from 1845 to 1861. In the 1840s he was closely associated with Thomas Cole, who is described in some sources as an informal instructor to him during that decade. In 1840 and 1841, funded by the merchant Jonathan Sturges, Durand spent about a year in Europe studying the Old Masters and contemporaries including Claude Lorrain, Nicolas Poussin, J.M.W. Turner, and John Constable.

His major paintings include Kindred Spirits (1849), now at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art; In the Woods (1855), at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and Progress (The Advance of Civilization) (1853), now at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Following Cole's death in 1848, the Metropolitan Museum of Art describes Durand as becoming "the acknowledged dean of American landscape painters." He painted his last picture around 1879 and died on September 17, 1886, in Jefferson Village, by then known as Maplewood, New Jersey, at age 90.

Institutional opinion has long placed Durand at the center of the Hudson River School's founding generation. The Metropolitan Museum of Art frames him as the movement's guiding figure after Cole's death, pointing to works such as In the Woods as evidence of his close, naturalistic observation of the American forest. His late, ambitious painting Progress has drawn more pointed critical attention: New York Times critic Grace Glueck, as cited in the scholarly journal Panorama, read it as a bold endorsement of Manifest Destiny and westward expansion, one that reverses the pessimism of Cole's The Course of Empire. That reading captures the broader critical arc around Durand: a painter of careful, closely observed woodland naturalism who, late in his career, allowed his landscapes to carry an explicit ideological argument about American expansion.

Durand's auction market is small relative to his historical stature, reflecting the limited number of paintings that reach public sale rather than any lack of demand. Market-data aggregators report USD 967,500 as his highest recorded auction price, but the specific work, auction house, and exact sale date could not be independently confirmed in current sources. Separately, Progress (The Advance of Civilization), reportedly valued near USD 40 million, was donated to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in 2018. That was a donation rather than an arm's length auction sale, so it stands apart from, and does not supersede, any confirmed auction record. Most Durand results at auction fall well below USD 967,500, in the low to mid six figures for paintings and considerably less for engravings and drawings.

There is no published catalogue raisonne for Durand, and no estate or gallery holds exclusive representation of his work; paintings, drawings, and engravings move through the secondary market, with Hirschl & Adler Galleries in New York a documented active dealer in his output. Because supply at auction is limited, a single strong or weak result can move the visible record considerably, and the widely cited USD 40 million figure for Progress should be understood as a donation valuation, not a market comparable. Given the absence of a catalogue raisonne, collectors should weight museum exhibition history and documented provenance heavily when evaluating any work offered as Durand's.