Espíritus afines

When the painter Thomas Cole died suddenly in 1848, his friends in New York wanted to honour him. Asher Durand, a fellow landscape painter, made this picture the next year as a memorial. It shows Cole himself, alive again, standing on a rocky ledge deep in the Catskill Mountains with the poet William Cullen Bryant, who had given the eulogy at Cole's funeral. The two men look out over a wooded gorge of exactly the wild American scenery they both spent their careers arguing was worth painting and worth keeping. The picture was a private gift to Bryant. Much later it hung for decades in the New York Public Library, until in 2005 it was sold for tens of millions of dollars and moved to a museum in Arkansas, far from the mountains it shows.