Thomas Moran, who was one of three brothers, all distinguished in art, came with them to this country from England in 1844, when he was seven years old. He continues to our day the traditions of Church; not directly, for his training came from an entirely different source, but by his natural preference for Nature in her more striking and impressive forms. A trip to the Yellowstone as early as 1871 furnished him with a series of subjects peculiarly his own; but, while he has always found matter for his brush in the marvels of the great West, he has added to them many of the most beautiful scenes of Great Britain, Switzerland, Venice, and the Orient, rendering them all with a sure facility and brilliance that make his canvases recognizable at a glance. In contrast to these men, who sought to give interest and dignity to their work by choosing imaginative or strange, far-sought subjects, may be placed those whose interest was rather in the familiar native landscape that lay about them, who found in it beauty sufficient for their needs if only they could fully express the emotions with which it inspired them. The two schools are anything but rigidly separated. The idealists made careful studies from nature, and the realists attempted excursions into allegory or scenic beauty; but the fundamental difference of the point of view is sufficiently marked. The two founders of our landscape schools are typical examples of the two temperaments. Thomas Cole, born abroad, with much of the sentimentality of Europe of that time, was a dreamer, sensitive, shy, living in his visions. THE TRUTH AND FEELING OF DURAND’S ART [Illustration: ASHER B. DURAND] Asher B. Durand, on the contrary, was of sturdy Huguenot stock, one of the many children of a farmer who cultivated his land on Orange Mountain, but whose ingenuity made him also a watchmaker, silversmith, and skilled mechanic generally. His son, after some boyish efforts at engraving, was apprenticed to that trade, and rapidly became by far the best engraver in the country, both prosperous and skilful. His masterpiece is the “Declaration of Independence,” which holds its own today as a most creditable production. He was still an engraver when Cole came to New York, and was one of the first to encourage him and buy his pictures. At this time Durand, though an older man by some five years than Cole, had not yet begun to paint. When he did some ten years later, in 1835, his first productions were portrait heads admirable in their delicate draftsmanship and sure, fine characterization; but he soon abandoned these for landscape, and for the latter part of his long life devoted himself entirely to it. [Illustration: IN THE WOODS, BY ASHER B. DURAND]