Trees on a Rocky Hillside (c. 1849): Art, History and Details

Trees on a Rocky Hillside (c. 1849) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Asher B. Durand (American, 1796–1886).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Durand was one of the first American artists to paint outdoors, rather than in the confines of a studio, which was the longstanding tradition. This outdoor oil sketch of a seemingly random corner of the woods offers an intimate view of a rock outcropping amid lush vegetation. Its small-scale, unusually cropped composition contrasts with the sweeping vistas in many other landscapes of the era.

Object facts

• Title: Trees on a Rocky Hillside
• Date: c. 1849
• Creator attribution: Asher B. Durand (American, 1796–1886)
• Culture: United States
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on canvas
• Dimensions: Framed: 64.8 x 83.2 x 7.9 cm (25 1/2 x 32 3/4 x 3 1/8 in.); Unframed: 42.5 x 61.3 cm (16 3/4 x 24 1/8 in.); Former: 53.5 x 72 x 6.5 cm (21 1/16 x 28 3/8 x 2 9/16 in.)
• Collection: American - Painting
• Department: American Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1968.21

A detail from the museum

Before becoming a painter, Durand designed paper currency for the federal government.

Collection credit

Mr. and Mrs. William H. Marlatt Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Talbot, William S. “American Visions of Wilderness.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 56, no. 4 (April 1969): 151–166.
• Adams, Henry. What's American about American art?: a gallery tour in the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2008.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.