The end of a year prompts many of us to look back at the past and try to draw out moments or images

The end of a year prompts many of us to look back at the past and try to draw out moments or images that resonate with our world today. One recent request for an image from Appleton’s Journal, a nineteenth century periodical in the Brooklyn Museum Library, brought to my attention an image that evokes the Brooklyn Museum’s past and issues we face today. The Library holds many historic journals that offer wonderful images, including engravings and photographs, that are of great value for their research and exhibition value. The requested image is of Asher B. Durand (1796-1886), today considered to be one of the fathers of American art, whose painting entitled First Harvest in the Wilderness, is a key object in the Museum’s American painting collection. Painted in 1855, this landscape forecasted the notion of Manifest Destiny and the transformation of the natural beauty of America into the cities we know today. The painting was commissioned with funds donated by Augustus Graham, founder of the Brooklyn Apprentice’s Library (predecessor of the Brooklyn Museum), as well as several other important Brooklyn institutions. Graham had donated funds to allow the Museum to commission works by contemporary artists working at that time – a lovely idea then and now!The Journal image depicts Asher B. Durand who was 74 years old at the time, sitting in front of his easel painting one of his well-known landscapes capturing the beauty of nature in America. The accompanying text in the Journal nicely describes Durand and his work: ”the purely American pictures so justly corresponding with their personal impressions of Nature… The woods have been his sanctuary, and the hollows of the hills serve him for a temple of worship… a pleasant sense of Nature has determined his pictorial gift.” Durand, who was friends with many artists and writers including Walt Whitman, had a strong awareness of nature and the potential destructive force of progress as the population increased and towns were developed across the United States. Like Durand, I think we are all sitting and looking at an easel these days and wondering what the future will bring. Fortunately we have history to learn from which can be found in the multitude of books, journals and archives held in research collections, such as Brooklyn’s Libraries and Archives, that continue to inform us and to prepare us to move forward in an educated and mindful way.  Posted by Deirdre Lawrence -- source link

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