In 1855, Asher B. Durand, a founder of the National Academy of Design and a leading member of the Hudson River School, wrote a series of articles for his son's art magazine, The Crayon. The nine articles, Letters on Landscape Painting, outlined Durand's thoughts on learning how to paint landscapes. They are considered by many to be the textbook for the Hudson River School. In the early 1900s, Birge Harrison, a prominent figure in the American Tonalist movement and a director of the landscape school of the Art Students League, gave a series of lectures to the students at the League's summer school in Woodstock, New York. He later compiled those twenty-one lectures into the book, Landscape Painting. Then, as now, the book was considered to be a standard work for students. This volume presents Durand's and Harrison's writings together for the first time. We will never know what each might have thought of their words being combined in such a way, however, over the years hundreds of budding landscape painters and professionals alike have found value in these writings. It only seems fitting that the textbooks of two of America's great landscape painting movements be made available in a single work.

Originally published in 1909, "Landscape Painting," by Birge Harrison is a collection of impromptu talks given before the Art Students League at its summer school in Woodstock, New York. Birge Harrison was born in Philadelphia in 1854. He initially trained in the Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, but within a year moved to Paris. There he remained for twelve years as student at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, working under Carolus Duran and Alexandre Cabanel. "Birge Harrison's volume on 'Landscape Painting' a fine commentary on the technique of the craft." -The New York Times, November 14, 1909