Landscape—Scene from "Thanatopsis"
Medium
Oil on canvas
Dimensions
39 1/2 x 61 in. (100.3 x 154.9 cm)
Classification
Painting
Culture
American
Department
The American Wing
Museum
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Credit
Gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1911
Accession Number
11.156
Tags
About this artwork
Asher Brown Durand created this monumental landscape in 1850, inspired by William Cullen Bryant's meditative poem 'Thanatopsis' (Greek for 'view of death'), which contemplates mortality within nature's vast cycles. The painting, first exhibited at the National Academy of Design, represents Durand's mature synthesis of Hudson River School aesthetics with deeply philosophical subject matter. The composition includes a funeral procession, a farmer engaged in daily labor, and architectural ruins fro...
Art Historical Context
Asher B. Durand's *Landscape—Scene from "Thanatopsis"* (1850), an oil-on-canvas masterpiece measuring nearly 40 by 61 inches, inspiration from William Cullen Bryant's poem *Thanatopsis*, a meditation on mortality amid nature's eternal cycles. Painted during the golden age of American landscape art, it captures a sweeping vista with mountains, a funeral procession, a farmer at work, and ruins evoking Egyptian, classical, and medieval civilizations—symbolizing death's universality across time and cultures. This monumental work, now in The Met's American Wing thanks to J. Pierpont Morgan's 1911 g...
About the Artist
Asher Brown Durand · 1796–1886
Was a principal member of the Hudson River School. American artist; associated with the Hudson River School of landscape painting. Comment on works: Portraits