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A placid river winds past low hills with cows to fields blanketed with trees leading back to mountains lining the horizon in this hazy, horizontal, landscape painting. The river curves in a tight backward C shape from the lower left corner of the composition. The right half of the foreground closest to us is made up of a gently sloping, grass-covered hill alongside the water. Four cows graze in the sunshine closer to the water, and the right portion is in deep shade under towering trees that nearly fill the right half of the composition. Logs, moss-covered boulders, stones, and plants line the bottom edge of the painting. Languid, golden light works across the treetops in the middle distance. The mountains along the horizon, which comes about a third of the way up this painting, are slate gray. The sky above is streaked with pale yellow near the horizon and deepens to pale blue along the top edge of the canvas. A few deeply shaded, ivory-yellow clouds float across the sky. The artist signed and dated the painting in the lower center, “A B Durand 1858.”
Read the visual description

A placid river winds past low hills with cows to fields blanketed with trees leading back to mountains lining the horizon in this hazy, horizontal, landscape painting. The river curves in a tight backward C shape from the lower left corner of the composition. The right half of the foreground closest to us is made up of a gently sloping, grass-covered hill alongside the water. Four cows graze in the sunshine closer to the water, and the right portion is in deep shade under towering trees that nearly fill the right half of the composition. Logs, moss-covered boulders, stones, and plants line the bottom edge of the painting. Languid, golden light works across the treetops in the middle distance. The mountains along the horizon, which comes about a third of the way up this painting, are slate gray. The sky above is streaked with pale yellow near the horizon and deepens to pale blue along the top edge of the canvas. A few deeply shaded, ivory-yellow clouds float across the sky. The artist signed and dated the painting in the lower center, “A B Durand 1858.”

National Gallery of Art · Painting

A Pastoral Scene

Asher Brown Durand

Date
1858
Medium
oil on canvas
Dimensions
overall: 55.5 x 82.3 cm (21 7/8 x 32 3/8 in.) framed: 83.2 x 108.9 cm (32 3/4 x 42 7/8 in.)
Classification
Painting
Accession number
1978.6.3
Credit line
Gift of Frederick Sturges, Jr.
Time span
1851 to 1875
Department
CAB
Original NGA record Wikidata

Subjects and terms

  • painted surface
  • American
  • Landscape
  • United States
  • landscape
  • Romantic
  • American Paintings of the Nineteenth Century, Part I [A-L]
Provenance

Frederick Sturges [d. 1917], New York, and Fairfield, Connecticut;[1] his son, Frederick Sturges, Jr. [1876-1977], New York, and Fairfield, Connecticut; bequest 1978 to NGA. [1] Although family tradition held that all of the Durand paintings in the Sturges collection were first owned by Jonathan Sturges, no evidence supports that assumption for _A Pastoral Scene_. Even though the evidence is inconclusive, it is more likely that Jonathan's son, Frederick Sturges, Sr., purchased the painting from the artist in 1858. In June 1858 Frederic Sturges, Sr., wrote to the artist: "I beg to enclose my check for five hundred and fifty dollars and I would again thank you for my beautiful picture" (letter of 16 June 1858, Durand papers, New York Public Library, as quoted in David B. Lawall, _Asher B. Durand: A Documentary Catalogue of the Narrative and Landscape Paintings_, New York, 1978: 120). Lawall (letter of 14 April 1980 in NGA curatorial files) agrees that _A Pastoral Scene_ may be the painting referred to in this letter, but notes that $550 would have been an appropriate price in 1858 for a painting measuring 30 by 40 inches, considerably larger than _Pastoral Scene_. Paintings by Durand of the size of the present example likely would have cost about $250 $300 in 1858 (see, for example, Lawall 1978, nos. 206 and 236), and even smaller pictures sold for about $100 (letter from Sturges to John Durand, 22 June 1858, John Durand papers, New York Public Library as quoted in a letter of 2 April 1982 from Wayne Craven in NGA curatorial files).

Inscription

lower center: A B Durand / 1858

NGA object ID 56572. Collection metadata is reproduced under CC0. This work is included because its NGA published-image record is marked open access; visitors should recheck the source record before substantial reuse.