After the death of Thomas Cole in 1848, leadership of the Hudson River School passed to Asher B. Durand. At an early age, he had been apprenticed to Peter Maverick, a prominent engraver in his home state of New Jersey. The two eventually went into partnership and opened a business in New York City, and by the mid 1820's their firm had attained considerable success in producing banknotes, book illustrations, portraits, and copies after other artists' work. Durand was pursuing a parallel path on his own, drawing from casts at the American Academy of Fine Arts. By 1826, he was a founding member of the National Academy of Design. His friendship with Cole bolstered his decision to become a landscape painter, and an 1837 sketching trip to the Adirondacks with Cole secured this new path. The following year Durand submitted nine paintings to the Academy's annual exhibition. A trip to Europe with follow artist John F. Kensett (1786- 1829) in the summer of 1840 exposed Durand to the work of the Old Masters that he has studied for so long. He confided in his journal that Claude Lorrain did not "surpass his expectations". This disenchantment with the closely held artistic conventions of the time must have sealed Durand's determination to paint from nature. Later that summer he wrote to his wife from Geneva: "I have found an agreeable change from the previous study of pictures to the study of nature, and nature too, in her utmost grandeur, beauty, and magnificence." For Durand, nature and progress were not opposing forces. In Landscape, there is little empathy for the figure of the Native American in the foreground, and no nostalgia for the vanishing scene he witness. A "lesser" civilization has simply yielded to a more "advanced" one. Durand often found himself in accord with the English critic and reformer John Ruskin (1819- 1900), who saw moral analogies in the depiction of nature. In his 1855 "Letters on Landscape Painting), Durand wrote about a nature "fraught with lessons of high and holy meaning."