Thomas Cole had influenced his artistic peers,…

Thomas Cole had influenced his artistic peers, especially Asher B. Durand and Frederic Edwin Church, who had studied with Cole from 1844 to 1846.

Durand’s Kindred Spirits had been commissioned by the merchant-collector Jonathan Sturges as a gift for William Cullen Bryant in gratitude for the nature poet's moving eulogy to Thomas Cole, who had died suddenly in early 1848.

It shows Cole, who had been Jonathan Sturges’ mentor, standing in a gorge in Catskills in company of a mutual friend William Cullen Bryant. (The painting, donated by Bryant's daughter Julia to the New York Public Library in 1904, will be sold by the library through Sotheby's at an auction in May 2005 to Alice Walton for a purported $35 million. The sale will be conducted as a sealed, first bid auction, so the actual sales price is not known. At $35 million, however, it would be a record price paid for an American painting at the time.)