Thomas Cole's sudden death from pleurisy, a lung condition, on 11 February 1848, sent shockwaves through New York society and stunned his close circle of friends. Cole's patron Jonathan Sturges commissioned Asher B. Durand to create a painting in his memory, in which Cole and the poet William Cullen Bryant were depicted as "kindred spirits." The artist's vision of the American landscape captured what the poet had described as:

the absence of those tamings and softenings of cultivation...a far spread wildness, a look as if the new world was fresher from the Hand of Him who made it...abstracting the mind from the associations of human agency [and carrying it] up to the idea of a mightier power and to the great mystery of the origins of things. ¹

Sturges gave Kindred Spirits to Bryant as thanks for delivering a poetic eulogy for Cole on 4 May 1848. Cole, Bryant, and Durand were indeed close throughout their lives, with combined friendships spanning over eighty years. All three artists shared an intimate spiritual relationship with nature and sought to convey that relationship through poetry and paintings.

Cole met Bryant when both men arrived in New York City in the 1820s. The two socialized at the Bread and Cheese Club, a lunchtime gathering of writers, artists, and other intellectuals who met to discuss art and culture. Established in 1827, ² the Sketch Club continued to foster relationships among writers, patrons, and Hudson River School artists; it provided a venue where these three men could meet. Durand bought one of Cole's first Catskill landscape paintings in 1825, marking the beginning of a lifelong friendship between the two men. It was Cole who first encouraged Durand, an engraver and painter of portraits and genre scenes, to turn to landscape painting. Cole and Durand took many sketching trips together to the Catskill, Adirondack, and White Mountains throughout their lives, and Cole even taught Durand to sketch and paint outdoors.

Cole and Bryant shared an interest in Europe; each took two trips there (separately) in the 1830s and 1840s. The ruins of Italy both deeply affected the two men and resonated in their respective works. Durand, however, found more pleasure in the hidden forest niches of New York than in European scenery, making only one trip to Italy during his life. Despite the distances imposed by their various travels, the three men were in constant contact through letters and met in New York as often as possible. ³

• John Trumbull, Asher B. Durand

1. The figures are William Cullen Bryant (left) and Thomas Cole (right). Bryant holds a walking stick and hat (perhaps in respect to the deceased Cole), while Cole carries his sketchbook and a flute, referring to his love of art and music.

2. Durand "carved" the names of Cole and Bryant into the tree, further solidifying the bond between the two.

3. The painting is a composite landscape, comprised of Kaaterskill Clove, Kaaterskill Falls, and Fawn's Leap (a geographically impossible view), and is a tribute to Cole's favorite places in the Catskills.

4. Once a popular hiking destination, Fawn's Leap is located below Kaaterskill Falls as the Creek descends from the Catskill Mountains (see stereograph photograph of Fawn's Leap). The stories behind its name are various, but like most legends associated with waterfalls, they have to do with death. One legend records that a doe and her fawn running from a hunter attempted to leap across the rocks above the falls. The doe cleared the jump, but the fawn fell and perished. Another recounts that the fawn made it, but the hunter's dog plunged to its death. Such stories underscore the romance associated with such sites in the Catskill Mountains during Cole's time.

5. A pair of birds may be a metaphor for Bryant and Cole. The white bird soaring over the Clove suggests Cole's soul ascending to heaven.

6. Cole used the blasted tree trunk as a signature motif in numerous works; this one also alludes to Durand's earlier portrait of Cole from 1838, which includes the same form.

Frederic Edwin Church, To The Memory of Cole, oil on canvas, 1848, 31 ¾ x 47 5/8 in. De Moines Women's Club. View in Scrapbook

Church created this work in April 1848, a month after Cole's death. Church was Cole's pupil and lived at Cedar Grove from 1844-46, where he mastered landscape painting and the technique of sketching outdoors. Drawing on Cole's signature style, Church created To The Memory of Cole to honor his teacher and to offer himself as Cole's successor. The painting shows the Catskills, and the image of storm clouds hovering over the mountains echoes a passage in Bryant's funeral oration: "It is as if the voyager on the Hudson were to look toward the great range of the Catskills, at the foot of which Cole, with a reverential fondness, had fixed his abode, and were to see that the grandest of its summits had disappeared—had sunk into the plain from our sight." The broken tree trunk in the foreground alludes to Cole's frequent use of that form in his work, and the morning light filtering over the scene represents Cole's rebirth, or ascent to heaven. Both Church and Cole were devout Christians. In late career, for example, Cole explored the theme of the lone cross in the forest in The Cross in the Wilderness, and Church used the same motif here in remembrance of his teacher. The wilderness setting for the artist's grave also seems to have been inspired by a poem by John Cole Hagen, entitled "To the Memory of the Late Thomas Cole":

Raise not a stone upon the spot
Where Cole's remains shall rest:
His works will be his monument,
The loftiest and the best.
Lay him among the rugged hills
He ever loved so well;
Let their proud summits be the mark
His resting-place to tell. ¹

The cross in Church's picture may be considered Cole's symbolic resting place, but he was actually buried in a family plot at the local cemetery in Catskill, down the street from Cedar Grove. ²

• Cole's Grave, Catskill, NY

My attention has often been attracted by the appearance of action and expression of surrounding objects, especially of trees. They spring from some resemblance to the human form. . . . Expose them to adversity and agitations, and a thousand original characters start forth, battling for existence or supremacy. On the mountain summit, exposed to the blasts, trees grasp the crags with their gnarled roots, and struggle with the elements with wild contortions. ¹

Durand paid homage to his one-time mentor by evoking Catskill scenes associated with Cole. He also included some of the latter's most characteristic motifs, for example, the blasted tree trunk at lower left. Cole borrowed the potent image of broken tree limbs from Salvator Rosa and used it in innumerable paintings, such as Sunrise in the Catskills. Kindred Spirits, however, is marked by Durand's characteristic style, with its vertical orientation, hazy unified forms, and dusky color palette. In fact, Cole—in a private moment—once confided to a colleague in the 1840s that his former "student" in landscape painting had become an unwelcome rival. ² . For Durand's part, he neglected to give Cole credit for schooling him in the principles of en plein air painting in his writings of the 1850s, ³ and as Daniel Peck has observed, Kindred Spirits may be a veiled assertion of Durand's artistic autonomy, as well as a memorial to a departed friend. ⁴

Works

1. Thomas Cole, Gnarled Tree Trunk, pen and brown ink over graphite pencil on cream wove paper, c.1826. Detroit Institute of Arts. Founders Society Purchase, William H. Murphy Fund, 39.162. View in Virtual Gallery

2. Thomas Cole, Sunrise in the Catskills, oil on canvas, 1826, 25 ½ x 35 ½ in. National Gallery of Art. Gift of Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3rd in honor of the 50th anniversary of the National Gallery of Art, 1989.24.1. View in Virtual Gallery

3. Asher B. Durand, Kindred Spirits, oil on canvas, 1849, 44 x 36 in. Courtesy Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR.

"The Burial Ground at Catskill"

The hill is climb'd and this the place of rest—
Here, among tombs beneath whose simple shade
Sleep those who wake not, when the eastern light
Streams o'er the hills, and gilds the silky grass
That waves, and whispers o'er their lowly bed.
Close are the earthy curtains that surround
Them drawn and not a single ray can pierce
The silent valley of their deep repose—
They need it not,—their tasks of toil are o'er—
No more the voice of friendship or of love
Calls them to gaze upon the glorious morn—
But oft a mourner o'er the simple tomb
Woos from his memory lov'd and cherish'd things
And as each image rises from the deep
The fount of sorrow gushes forth afresh—
This is indeed a place of rest and such
Would be my choice if heav'n would grant my boon,
To be sepulchred here—to rest upon
The spot of earth that living I have lov'd.
No marble pile, no vaunting verse I wish
To mark my resting place to tell the world
Of virtues that I ne'er possess'd—for pomp
An icier chill gives to the cold clay—
But here! beneath the solemn dome of heaven,
Where the free winds forever warble wild
Where yon far mountains steep; would constant look
Upon the grave of one who lov'd to gaze on them—

O! I have stood here when the westering sun
Had placed a glory on the scene and gaz'd
Upon the mountains woods, and sky, until
My spirit disenthralled, forgot its clay—
It moved among the mountains and amid
The clouds rejoicing held its way. ¹

Find it here.