God's Judgment Upon Gog

This oil on canvas painting was inspired by the Old Testament wherein Ezekiel foretells God's destruction of Gog, the infidel prince of Rosh, Meshech and Tubal. In the painting, Ezekiel, standing on the lower left promontory, calls forth at God's command predatory birds and wild beasts to devour Gog's troops. The troops fill the valley; the birds sweep down from the sky and the wild beasts, seen in the foreground, approach the troops.		Asher B. Durand
American (1796-1886)
God's Judgment Upon Gog, ca. 1851-1852
Oil on canvas
Gift of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr.
American Art
Location:  Exhibit, Gallery 204
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Dimensions:  H: 60 3/4 in, W: 50 1/2 in
Object ID: 71.499

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This oil on canvas painting was inspired by the Old Testament wherein Ezekiel foretells God's destruction of Gog, the infidel prince of Rosh, Meshech and Tubal. In the painting, Ezekiel, standing on the lower left promontory, calls forth at God's command predatory birds and wild beasts to devour Gog's troops. The troops fill the valley; the birds sweep down from the sky and the wild beasts, seen in the foreground, approach the troops.
Asher B. Durand
Springfield Township, N.J. 1796-1886 Maplewood, N.J.
God's Judgment Upon Gog, c. 1851-52
Oil on canvas, 60 3/4 × 50 1/2 in. (154.3 × 128.3 cm)
Gift of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr., 71.499

References: J. Gray Sweeney, "'Endued with Rare Genius,' Frederic Edwin Church's To the Memory of Cole," Smithsonian Studies in American Art2 (Winter 1988), pp. 63, 71 n. 47; Gail E. Husch, Something Coming: Apocalyptic Expectation and Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Painting, Hanover, N.H., 2000, pp. 180-200; Andrew Wilton and Tim Barringer, American Sublime: Landscape Painting in the United States 1820-1880, exhib. cat., Tate Britain, London, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, and Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 2002, pp. 88-90, no. 9.

In the late 1830s, after winning acclaim in New York City as an engraver and as a painter of portraits and genre scenes, Asher B. Durand turned to landscape painting. With the financial backing of his patron, Jonathan Sturges, Durand toured the Continent in 1840-41, and upon his return he joined his close friend Thomas Cole at the forefront of New York's famed Hudson River School of landscape painters (see objects 80.30, 84.32, 86.193, 81.109, 89.59, 63.34.1).
Durand was closely associated with Cole throughout his middle period. On an 1837 sketching campaign with him in the Adirondack Mountains, Durand decided to specialize in landscape painting, and after 1850 he was influenced considerably by Cole's Romantic landscape style. In 1826 Durand joined Cole and thirteen other artists in founding New York's National Academy of Design, which he served as president for sixteen years, from 1845 to 1861. After Cole's sudden death in 1848, Durand painted, in his memory, the landscape that would become his most famous work, Kindred Spiritsof 1849 (New York Public Library). The painting confirmed his emergence as leader of the American landscape school.
Durand devoted himself overwhelmingly to "pure" landscape images: straightforward, naturalistically conceived forest scenes and contemplative mountain views. Only occasionally did he produce more imaginative historical or allegorical landscapes in the manner of Cole. By far the most notable of these rare narrative works is God's Judgment Upon Gog of c. 1851-52. The painting's grandiose biblical ­subject-unusual in Durand's otherwise placid oeuvre-was chosen by Jonathan Sturges, who commissioned the picture and had it shown in 1852 at the National Academy of Design, where it was generally well received.
The painting was inspired by a passage from the book of Ezekiel (39:17) in which that Old Testament prophet foretells God's destruction of Gog, the infidel prince of Rosh, Meshech, and Tubal, and the enemy of Israel. Standing on a promontory at the lower left of the picture, Ezekiel calls forth, at God's command, the predatory birds and wild beasts that will devour Gog's troops in the valley of Hamon-gog:
And, thou son of man, thus saith the Lord God; Speak unto every feathered fowl, and to every beast of the field, Assemble yourselves, and come; gather yourselves on every side to my sacrifice . . . that ye may eat flesh, and drink blood.
The basic structure of the landscape in God's Judgment Upon Gogrecalls that of Kindred Spirits. Yet its setting-the rocky crags, boiling black clouds, and jagged lightning bolts-is considerably more desolate and wild and, in fact, is more closely allied with the pictorial conventions of the eighteenth-century "sublime" landscape. The darkly apocalyptic tone may also reflect larger cultural fears in mid-nineteenth-century America, where mounting political and religious ferment was spawning a period of millennial anxiety.
JCH
 

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