Several years ago, Linda Ferber decided that Asher B. Durand, the least celebrated of the Hudson River School painters, was due for a revival. Now he’s getting it, with three exhibitions, two of them curated by Ms. Ferber, set to open in New York, beginning next week with the Brooklyn Museum of Art’s “Kindred Spirits: Asher B. Durand and the American Landscape.”

During his lifetime, Durand was a major figure. He was involved with almost every significant cultural institution of ante-bellum New York, including the New-York Historical Society, the National Academy of Design, the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences (which later became the Brooklyn Museum), and the Sketch Club (later, the Century Association). Both his paintings and his writings on landscape painting were highly influential.

Yet Durand has been neglected by scholars and curators — his serene pictures passed over in favor of the more tempestuous and dramatic visions of Frederic Church, or his friend Thomas Cole. Durand has not had a major exhibition since 1972, and there have been only two publications on him: that show’s modest catalog and a lone dissertation.

“He was involved in every major cultural association in the early 19th century, and he had a very long life span, so his presence was pervasive,” Ms. Ferber, who is the director of the museum division at the New-York Historical Society, said. “And yet he is curiously understudied.”

Ms. Ferber began planning the Brooklyn Museum show while she was the head of the American art department there. In 2005, she departed for the Historical Society, so she has ended up curating its show, which opens in mid-April, as well as guest curating the one in Brooklyn. The Historical Society holds the largest collection of Durand’s works anywhere and is the major lender to the Brooklyn Museum exhibition.

Durand was a founder of two of New York’s early artistic institutions, both of which will also recognize him with exhibitions this year. In 1826, he was among the 12 founders of the National Academy of Design, a professional organization formed to elevate the status of artists in America, which was modeled on the Royal Academy in London. Durand was the president between 1845 and 1861. In July the National Academy will open an exhibition highlighting his role there.

In 1827, Durand and some other members of the National Academy formed a more informal association called the Sketch Club, which 20 years later would become the Century Association. Since the club included both professionals and amateurs, it was a way for the artists to meet potential patrons. “They would meet monthly at each other’s residences, talk about the politics of the day, and then do sketches from biblical or mythological scenes,” the curator at the Century Association, John Harding, said. Mr. Harding said he is organizing a “modest” exhibition of five or six Durand works from the Association’s collection; however, it will not be open to the public.

In the Brooklyn Museum exhibition, Ms. Ferber tried to represent all the major periods of Durand’s career — he started out as an engraver, then became a portraitist and genre painter, before turning to landscapes in the 1840s — within a self-imposed limit of 50 oil paintings.

At the Historical Society, she wanted to situate Durand among his artistic and literary friends — a group known as the Knickerbocker circle, after the pseudonym Washington Irving used for his “History of New York” — and to illustrate his relationship to his most important patron, Luman Reed. A merchant and art collector interested in fostering the development of an American artistic culture, Reed in 1835 gave Durand an important commission: a set of portraits of the American presidents — all seven of them.

After Reed died suddenly in 1836, a group of businessmen, led by Reed’s partner, Jonathan Sturges, bought his collection and set it up as the New York Gallery of Fine Arts. It was the first public collection in the city. The gallery didn’t have a permanent home until it was deposited at the Historical Society in 1858, becoming the core of the latter’s art collection. The Historical Society continued to add to its Durand holdings over the years, including acquiring, after his death, the contents of his studio.

The artists and writers in the Knickerbocker circle, who included Irving, Cole, James Fenimore Cooper, and the poet William Cullen Bryant, wanted to create an authentically American art and literature, and they found their perfect subject in nature.

“There was an idea that Americans had a special relationship with the land — that, in particular, the less settled or rural areas, the wilderness, was perhaps the most powerful expression of a kind of New World destiny, which was at the opposite end of the spectrum from the well-used landscape of Europe,” Ms. Ferber said.

The landscape painters believed that nature held spiritual lessons, an assistant professor of art history at Wellesley College, Rebecca Bedell, said. They were interested in contemporary developments in geology, but specifically in a Christianized, moralizing geology. “For [Durand], studying nature was a path to the divine,” Ms. Bedell said.

New York City’s growing wealth, and its location at the mouth of the Hudson River, which became a well-traveled route for artists seeking unsettled nature, created the perfect conditions for the development of an artistic movement and a cultural infrastructure.

“As New York becomes, in the pre-Civil War years, by far the largest city in the United States, the clear financial and commercial center, the busiest port, with the most expensive real estate and the greatest diversity, almost inevitably it begins to foster a creative, artistic culture, as well,” the historian Kenneth T. Jackson said.

The title of the Brooklyn Museum show is taken from Durand’s painting “Kindred Spirits,” which he painted for Bryant as a memorial to Cole, and which shows Bryant and Cole in the Kaaterskill Clove in the Catskills. The painting is celebrated as an iconic image from the Hudson River School, but it is sometimes associated more closely with the two men it depicts than with the one who painted it. “I wanted to give this picture back to Durand,” Ms. Ferber said.

Perhaps part of the reason Durand has been neglected is that he is too much in Cole’s shadow. During their lifetime, Ms. Ferber said, New York critics enjoyed setting them up as rivals, even though they were in fact friends. “There was a feeling that Cole was the great master of the wilderness, while Durand had his own, more pastoral and domestic landscape vision.”

“He is quieter than some of these other artists,” Ms. Bedell said. “He believes in a landscape in repose.” In her book on American landscape painting, she added, “I talked about him in the context of the therapeutic culture of the 19th century and the notion that these paintings offer you a respite from the crass materialism of the time and the cacophony of life in New York.”

On May 20, Cedar Grove, a museum and historic site located at Cole’s house in the Catskills, is opening its own exhibition dedicated to Durand and hosting a symposium, “Why Durand, Why Now?” featuring Ms. Ferber, as well as two curators from the National Gallery and the Detroit Institute of the Arts.

Ms. Bedell said the attention is deserved, even overdue. “I’ve been waiting for Linda Ferber’s exhibition for years!” she said.