From the Bryant Room Archives
By Myrna Sloam ©July/August 2005
Bidding Farewell to “Kindred Spirits”
“To him who, in the love of Nature, holds
Communion with her visible forms, she speaks
A various language…” from Thanatopsis by W.C. Bryant
On May 12th 2005 the renowned landscape painting “Kindred Spirits” was sold at auction by the New York Public Library. According to the May 13th New York Times, the buyer, in closed bidding at Sotheby’s, was Alice L. Walton of the Walton Family Foundation (Wal-Mart) who intends to display the painting at a museum which is being planned in Bentonville Arkansas.
The news of this sale (reported to be at more than $35 million) was of interest to all art lovers, and especially to New Yorkers, who will now see this great painting leave its long standing public home in New York City. It is also of interest to those of us in Roslyn, since this 1849 painting by Asher B. Durand depicts the poet William Cullen Bryant, and hung in Cedarmere, Bryant’s Roslyn home, until it was given by the poet’s daughter in 1904 to the Lenox Library, which later was incorporated into the New York Public Library.
To those of us who remember seeing “Kindred Spirits” during its long years in the New York Public Library, this sale is a startling loss and a reminder of how an object of art, so connected to a place can be lost to the public, due to financial considerations of an owning institution. In this case, the New York Public Library, which announced in April that it would be selling a number of art works to raise money for the library’s endowment.
Recognized as one of the finest works of American art, “Kindred Spirits” shows artist Thomas Cole and his friend Bryant looking down from a ledge into a glowing Catskill valley. Commissioned after Cole’s death, it was intended to depict the friendship and the love of nature the two men shared. The painting is a fitting tribute to them, as well as to an idea of beauty that was reflected in the Hudson River School of landscape painting, of which Cole was a founder, and Bryant an avid supporter.
Nature poet and journalist, Bryant (1794-1878) had a strong regard for the arts and for cultural institutions. He founded a Reading Room for the people of Roslyn, which became the Bryant Library and he built a library in his hometown of Cummington, MA. Believing in the healing powers of nature, he was the first to advocate for a Central Park for the people of New York City. He was a founding member of the National Academy of Design and the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 1869 Bryant delivered an address at the founding of the Metropolitan in which he stressed the need for “an extensive public gallery to contain the greater works of our own painters and sculptors.” In that same address he also said that “Besides the cultivation of the sense of beauty—in other words, the perception of order, symmetry, proportion of parts, which is of near kindred to the moral sentiments—the intelligent contemplation of a great gallery of works of art is a lesson in history, a lesson in biography, a lesson in the antiquities of different countries.”
The quick sale of “Kindred Spirits” and its removal from its public home in New York City, is a shocking loss of heritage for all the people of New York. It is too late to change the outcome—the sale is done, the painting gone. We, along with other New Yorkers, can look back and wish that the New York Public Library could have found another way to raise funds or, that the library would have reached out to benefactors or other city institutions, like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in a more open way, to try to ensure that this New York treasure would have remained here, on public view, in the city that Bryant loved. But, this loss can also act as a wake-up call. We must, as citizens, support our cultural institutions and enable them to find better ways to address funding needs. In addition, as New Yorkers, we can remind Mrs. Walton of the ties that bind “Kindred Spirits” to New York and urge her to allow the painting to travel back here. We can also hope that the planned museum in Arkansas is completed and that once again “Kindred Spirits” will have the public viewing space it deserves.
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Email: localhistory@bryantlibrary.org