Asher Durand Kindred Spirits - Public domain portrait painting

Kindred Spirits was commissioned by the merchant-collector Jonathan Sturges as a gift for William Cullen Bryant in gratitude for the nature poet's eulogy to Thomas Cole, who had died suddenly during early 1848. It shows Cole, who had been Jonathan Sturges mentor, standing in a gorge in Catskills in the company of mutual friend William Cullen Bryant.