it for the more profitable field
of portraiture. The first of the American school of landscapists may be
fairly said to be Asher Brown Durand. Durand was the eighth of eleven
children, and his father, who managed a small farm on the slope of
Orange Mountain, in New Jersey, was renowned throughout the neighborhood
for his mechanical ingenuity. Much of this ingenuity his son inherited,
and his first artistic effort was an attempt to reproduce the woodcuts
in his school books by engraving them on little plates which he had
beaten out of copper cents. This led to his being apprenticed to an
engraver, and after his apprenticeship was over, he devoted three years
to engraving the plate of Trumbull's "Signing of the Declaration of
Independence." The work was excellently done and established Durand's
reputation.

But he was not satisfied with engraving, and soon abandoned it for the
more creative work of painting. He tried his hand first at portraiture,
in which he had considerable success; but he turned more and more to
landscape work as the years went on. He practiced it continuously until
his eighty-third year. Then he laid down his brush forever, saying, "My
hand will no longer do my bidding," and the remaining seven years of his
life were passed peacefully on the farm where he was born.

Durand's work is marked throughout by sincerity and skill, if not by
genius. His portraits were in a style especially his own, thorough in
workmanship, delicately modelled and strongly painted. His landscapes,
too, are his own, clearly and definitely finished, and with a bewitching
silvery gray tone, which could have come only by painting direct from
his subject in the open air, a practice exceptional at the time. His
pictures are not "compositions," in the artistic sense of the term--that
is, he did not combine detail into a balanced whole; they are rather
studies or sketches from nature, with a central point of interest. But
the work is done so truly and with such patience and enthusiasm that it
deserves the sincerest admiration.

Joined with Durand as the earliest of the landscapists is Thomas Cole.
Cole was born in England and did not come to America until he had
reached his nineteenth year, but he afterwards became so good an
American that he declared he would give his left hand to have been
identified with America by birth instead of adoption. He found
employment in Philadelphia as an engraver. Then, after some practice, he
got to