Indeed, the painting becomes symbolic of a national romantic ideology and is analysed as such rather than on its own terms. Bryant and Cole become metonyms for their art, and Durand seems to disappear entirely. It is true that in accepting Kindred Spirits as a “convenient shorthand,” we lose certain details.
“ Kindred Spirits” he writes, “got away from Durand.”
Kindred Spirits becomes merely an illustration for a narrative from which Durand is excluded. The problem with such approaches is, according to Peck, that they fail to do justice to Durand’s individual vision as an artist and to the true relation between poetry and painting at the time. Durand’s painting stages for us the moment of discovery of an interdisciplinary American romantic way of looking. Moving from the immediate spatial frame of the painting as a landscape and thinking of the painting historically we then realise that between them, Cole and Bryant have come to be thought of as the two figuresresponsible for a re-evaluation of the virtues of the New World’s nature in the nineteenth century and that they determined, in essence, what was to become a transcendentalist aesthetics. The two figures, and the two media are kindred spirits, working with the same conceptual vocabulary for nature. Moving further forward we follow Cole’s gaze and chance upon Bryant, the original poet of the American landscape. In the background is the untouched American wilderness, a source of inspiration for Thomas Cole, the original painter of the American landscape. Although Peck doesn’t expand on these connections, they are not difficult to read. In other words, Kindred Spirits presents to us our preconceptions of, 1: the connection between poetry and painting in the mid nineteenth-century, and 2: the connection between nature and culture in that era. (which it did not possess in the nineteenth century) has to do, in part, with the way the painting conveniently shorthands our own twentieth- and twenty-first-century perspectives on the relation of the sister arts in the mid-nineteenth century and with our own formulations about nature and culture in that era. Daniel Peck offers a more devious source. In his recent article, “Unlikely Kindred Spirits: A New Vision of Landscape in the Works of Henry David Thoreau and Asher B. But in themselves these gestures are not sufficient.
Where is this iconicity in Kindred Spirits? Why has it come to be so closely associated with an original / originary American nationalism? The virgin forest, the waterfall, the Catskill mountains, and two pioneering figures, like the spread-eagle hovering above certainly gesture toward patriotic symbolism. Immediately hailed as a masterpiece of American landscape in 1849, Kindred Spirits has since become something of a national icon. As a nostalgic image of an ideal, definitively American moment, its own afterlife as the “spirit” of America is worth considering. True to Keats’s “haunts” of solitude, Kindred Spirits, is a painting imbued with ideas of an earthly afterlife. Crystal Bridges – Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas. This poem, which describes an escape in nature, ends with the lines: “it sure must be / Almost the highest bliss of human-kind, / When to thy haunts two kindred spirits flee.” The result is Kindred Spirits (fig. Durand, to capture the friendship of Cole and Bryant in paint, giving him as a basis for the image, Keats’s poem, “Sonnet to Solitude”. Listening to this oration, the New York dry-goods merchant and art collector Jonathan Sturges, is so moved that he decides to commission a memorial image. Together they sally into the wilderness.Įight years later, on February 11, 1848, Cole dies suddenly, and Bryant is called upon to supply his funeral oration at the National Academy of Design. “There is a valley a few miles above the Clove-” writes Cole, “I have never explored it & am reserving the delicate morsel to be shared with you-Let me know that you can come & that quickly for if possible I would explore the Platte-Kill valley before the waters are low-.” Bryant leaves New York and arrives at Cole’s house in Cedar Grove before the end of the month. On June 15 th 1840, William Cullen Bryant received an invitation from his friend Thomas Cole to visit him in the Catskills.
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