With dismay I read last month that the New York Public Library plans to “divest” itself of several of the artworks that it owns so as to raise an estimated $50 million to $75 million to augment the library’s endowment and collections. One of my longstanding pleasures as a New Yorker has been to visit, often in a spontaneous manner whilst passing by the library, the Edna Barnes Salomon Room to feast my eyes on “Kindred Spirits,” the Asher Durand canvas that must rank among the greatest of American paintings. I loved the setting, so different from that of the American Wing, where the embarrassment of riches can make difficult the proper delectation of a particular picture.

I also loved that this painting should be in the building backing onto the park named for William Cullen Bryant, one of the greatest of all New Yorkers. For Bryant is the subject of Durand’s painting. Specifically, Bryant and Thomas Cole are Durand’s human subjects, contemplating from a rock ledge the majesty of a gloriously rendered Catskills ravine.

Durand, born in Maplewood, N.J., in 1796, won early renown as an engraver, illustrator, and portrait painter in New York before turning to landscape, inspired by the English emigre Thomas Cole, whom we credit as the father of the “Hudson River School.” Durand was very active in the New York cultural scene and helped found both the National Academy of Design and the Century Association (both of which own important Durand pictures). Durand’s 1855 “Letters on Landscape Painting” were a kind of manifesto of the Hudson River School and showed the profound influence of the English critic John Ruskin upon both Durand’s works and the aims of the movement as a whole.

Cole died in 1848. Durand painted “Kindred Spirits” in the following year, as a tribute to his mentor. It was a tribute, as well, to Durand’s close friend Bryant.

Bryant’s nature poetry inspired many of Durand’s pictures. By the time of “Kindred Spirits,” Bryant had become the influential editor of the New York Evening Post, in which capacity he led the public movement for the creation of Central Park. Later, he befriended and supported Lincoln, and became, in many ways, New York’s “first citizen.” It has always seemed to me to be just that “Kindred Spirits” should reside within the building that backs not only onto Bryant Park but also onto the park’s Bryant memorial, which features a monumental seated figure of the poet by Herbert Adams within an elaborate marble canopy by the architect Thomas Hastings.

The picture by Durand, so outstanding in its detail, light, and perspective; its function as a tribute to two titans of New York arts and letters; its proximity to a fine monument to Bryant in his eponymous park – all this was (and briefly shall continue to be) so perfect that the removal of “Kindred Spirits” will mean not just the removal of a beloved painting from a beloved setting, but also a diminishment of New York City itself.