LANDSCAPE PAINTING

In 1855, Asher B. Durand, a founder of the National Academy of Design and a leading member of the Hudson River School, wrote a series of articles for his sons art magazine, The Crayon. The nine articles, Letters on Landscape Painting, outlined Durands thoughts on learning how to paint landscapes. They are considered by many to be the textbook for the Hudson River School. In the early 1900s, Birge Harrison, a prominent figure in the American Tonalist movement and a director of the landscape school of the Art Students League, gave a series of lectures to the students at the Leagues summer school in Woodstock, New York. He later compiled those twenty-one lectures into the book, Landscape Painting. Then, as now, the book was considered to be a standard work for students. This volume presents Durands and Harrisons writings together for the first time. We will never know what each might have thought of their words being combined in such a way, however, over the years hundreds of budding landscape painters and professionals alike have found value in these writings. It only seems fitting that the textbooks of two of Americas great landscape painting movements be made available in a single work._,