A Sycamore Tree, Plaaterkill Clove (The Sycamore, Kaaterskill Clove)

On view in the American Art before 1900 galleries

Asher Brown Durand believed that in order for an artist to achieve the ideal, he must first perfect the real. His now-famous “Letters on Landscape Painting” (1855), published in the art journal Crayon, instructed fellow artists to “paint and repaint until you are sure that the work represents the model—not that it merely resembles it.” A Sycamore Tree, Plaaterkill Clove is a result of this artistic process. Durand painted it as a plein-air study, visually dissecting the forest interior, which would become the foreground in the final picture, The Catskills (1859; now in the collection of the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore). Durand intensely scrutinized the mossy tree trunk not for the purpose of scientific inquiry but because he viewed the study of nature as a path to spiritual enlightenment, for nature was thought to hold the key to revelation.