Asher Brown Durand (August 21, 1796 – September 17, 1886) was an American engraver and painter of the Hudson River School.

Between 1829 and 1850, he submitted illustrations and engravings for The Token and Atlantic Souvenir annual gift book, including the title page for the 1829 volume.

In 1837, he accompanied his friend Thomas Cole on a sketching expedition to Schroon Lake in the Adirondacks Mountains, and soon after he began to concentrate on landscape painting.

Durand wrote, "Let [the artist] scrupulously accept whatever [nature] presents him until he shall, in a degree, have become intimate with her infinity...never let him profane her sacredness by a willful departure from truth."

Wrote Durand, "[T]he true province of Landscape Art is the representation of the work of God in the visible creation..."Durand is noted for his 1849 painting Kindred Spirits which shows fellow Hudson River School artist Thomas Cole and poet William Cullen Bryant in a Catskills Mountains landscape.

The landscape depicts America's progress, from a state of nature (on the left, where Native Americans look on), towards the right, where there are roads, telegraph wires, a canal, warehouses, railroads, and steamboats.