Some artists shape history, and others are carried by its flow. Asher B. Durand (1796–1886) would seem to fit both categories. His nearly 60 works in the Brooklyn Museum’s “Kindred Spirits,” which opens tomorrow, suggest a kind of scrupulous visionary: a sensitive, driven man who became not just an accomplished artist but also an institution. The leading light of the Hudson River School after Thomas Cole’s early death, he served for nearly two decades as president of the National Academy of Design, then a locus for artists seeking a progressive response to European traditions. Today, his diligent landscapes may seem less daring than Frederic Church’s or Cole’s, but they equally embody the midcentury spirit of a nation confident in its destiny and tastes.

Although he believed passionately in nature’s therapeutic effects, Durand lived most of his life in New York City, where as a young man he soon fell in with leading artists and collectors. He first excelled as an engraver, and the several prints in “Kindred Spirits” include his large 1823 reproduction of John Trumbull’s huge painting “Declaration of Independence.” Here Durand transcribes with remarkable grace a difficult scene with scores of figures. Nearby, his 1835 print reproducing John Vanderlyn’s painting “Ariadne” depicts a languorous nude with astonishing suppleness. The restless Durand, however, soon turned to oil portraits. Though largely self-taught, he triumphed here, too, judging from several lively examples. Among them is a brilliant likeness of Cole (c. 1837), which not only effortlessly models his features but captures his genial, impish energy as well.

In 1837, however, a painting excursion to the Adirondacks with Cole converted Durand forever to the landscape. For four decades he was to make annual trips to the mountains of the Northeast, producing plein air sketches that he later worked into larger compositions, all in pursuit of what he called “the simple truths of Nature, which constitute the true Religion of Art, and the only safeguard against the inroads of heretical conventionalism.” For Durand, “conventionalism” meant a departure from factual observations, though one of the intriguing aspects of “Kindred Spirits” is his frequent reliance on conventional devices.

His early landscapes reflect a number of influences: Aelbert Cuyp’s pairings of cows and trees, Constable’s sunlight-carved masses, and, above all, the light of Claude Lorrain’s luminous harbors. With the “The Beeches” (1845), Durand had found his own motif, and indeed this vertical scene of a forest interior, with great, shadowy trunks vanishing into the leafy reaches above, became a model for his peers.

In some paintings, such as “June Shower” (1854), a dense, crisp modeling of foreground objects seems to reflect an engraver’s method of wringing maximum clarity from a given situation. But in the same year, Durand produced the more freely composed “Clearing Up” that hangs alongside. Here he sets the stillness of a forest, spreading powerfully across the entire mid-distance, against eruptions of light in the jagged clouds and hills above.

One surprise of the exhibition are nearly 20 small plein air studies, as precise and complete as the artist’s large paintings, but more spontaneous in technique. “Study from Nature: Trees, Newburgh, New York” (1849) shows an innocent delight in the tiny, spry strokes of light penetrating leafy boughs. The hues in the open shade of “A Sycamore Tree, Plaaterkill Clove” (c. 1858) are remarkably close in tone, but lucid in distinguishing orange-pink soil from tiers of verdant green. Hanging nearby, the large painting produced from this study preserves its freshness of color to a surprising degree. Its far greater detail, however, adds busyness rather than resonance to the spacious scene.

Complexity is not the same as plentitude, and a number of fullscale compositions with grand narratives tend to be more effortful than inspired. In these, the Claudian device of framing foreground trees repeatedly returns, sometimes as dull darks that lack the conviction of color. Durand’s use of atmospheric perspective (a bluing and muting of distant objects) often seems formulaic, and the mininarratives provided by small figures in these scenes can feel like obligatory anecdotes. “Progress (The Advance of Civilization)” (1853), with its indifferent darks and tiny American Indians peering at a thriving homestead, succumbs to all these faults at once.

Durand fared better when satisfying his private interests — telling simple stories, for instance, of trees rising in wooded enclaves or before unfolding vistas. “In the Woods” (1855) doesn’t achieve Courbet’s or Corot’s muscular locating of forms — it’s as if Durand were loathe to manhandle nature with such finality — but it does attain something else: a beautiful and complex adjusting of degrees of light within a cathedral-like space. “Kaaterskill Clove” (1866), the latest canvas in the exhibition, radiates a quiet, serene monumentality In this canvas, two weathered foreground trees seem to share our admiration of the view below, where curving hillsides — massive in shape, but tinged a delicate gray-green by haze — pile toward the horizon. If Durand sometimes seemed to toil in publicizing the wondrous, here his personal honoring of nature is enough to compel.

Until July 29 (200 Eastern Parkway at Washington Avenue, Brooklyn, 718-638-5000).