One hundred years before the birth of the fabled New York School, there was another New York school, less known to history, that was centered around the august personage of Asher Brown Durand.

This is proving to be a bumper year for Mr. Durand. There is a sprawling monographic exhibition of the artist at the Brooklyn Museum, curated by Linda Ferber. There is also a small sampling of Durand’s works in the lobby of the Century Association and, in a few weeks, the National Academy Museum will present yet another abbreviated exhibit of his works. Finally, at the New-York Historical Society, a second show by Ms. Ferber, “The World of Asher B. Durand,” documents the artistic context in which this master of portraiture and landscape worked for most of his 90 years.

Even museumgoers whose appetite for Durand (1796–1886) may already have reached the saturation point with the Brooklyn show would do well to visit the exhibition at the Historical Society. Though it contains two dozen worthy paintings by the artist and his contemporaries, it is no less interesting for its efforts to provide some sense of the New York art scene in the generation before the Civil War.

If you were to go back one generation further, to the end of the 18th century or the beginning of the 19th century, you would not be able to speak plausibly of a New York art scene, as you could certainly speak of an art scene in contemporary London or Paris. Surely New York saw scattered instances of creative aspiring, of dealers trafficking in landscapes, portraits, and genre scenes. There was even the occasional piece of criticism in the local press. But these events were too few and too far between to coalesce into what we might call an art world.

Ezra Pound once asserted that you need 500 people, of the right talents and intensity, to constitute a proper civilization. In the years just before the Civil War, the period covered by this show, the population of New York had risen to nearly 800,000, a sufficient density of artistic producers and consumers to engender, for the first time, what we might appreciate as an energetic artistic establishment. At this point in its gestation, however, the New York art scene that the Historical Society documents is more like a foal finding its legs than like the galloping thoroughbred we recognize today.

Landscapes such as Durand’s “Beacon Hills on the Hudson” (1852) and his self-portrait (1835), together with 20 other works on view, uncover an artistic culture enfeoffed to the traditions of England and France. There is, at every moment, an implicit avowal of one’s provinciality and one’s distance from the true wellsprings of visual culture, an ocean away. But in a more important sense, the show gives us the first precocial stirrings of the Leviathan that now extends from Chelsea all the way to Madison Avenue and Museum Mile.

Through maps, engravings, and letters, no less than paintings, we catch a fleeting glimpse of a community of dedicated, self-important culturati percolating up amid the mercantile classes that ran the city. There are portraits of patrons — such as Luman Reed, a benefactor of Durand and many others — as well as at least one contemporary journal, the New-York Mirror, which contains a notably pompous discussion of what — at the time — must have been a major cultural event in the city, the unveiling of an extravagant series of portraits of the first eight presidents. If anything, one would have been grateful to see much more of that kind of contemporary documentation in the show.

Though the exhibition devotes some space to Durand’s portraits and to those highly lucrative engravings that supported him well into his 40s, its most interesting element is the landscapes that he and his contemporaries produced. America lacked ruins and antiquities, but it could boast a geographic immensity and a natural sublimity that had few comparisons in the more temperate zones of Western Europe.

At least two of these landscapes provide a good testimonial of Durand’s most enduring artistic legacy. Both “Study from Nature: Rocks and Trees” (1856) and “Studies From Nature, Group of Trees” (1857) attest to that fresh and unmediated examination of nature, freed from immemorial convention, that a number of painters of this period aspired to, in Europe as well as in America. And yet, notwithstanding the more traditional work that Durand made before and after the examples in question, we can safely say that none of his contemporaries went farther down this path than he did.

In order to gain some sense of Durand’s ubiquity on the New York art scene (not to mention the underappreciated longevity of the city’s cultural institutions), consider that he was a member, if not a founding member, of all four of the institutions that honor him this year, the New-York Historical Society, the Brooklyn Museum, the National Academy Museum, and the Century Association, and that all four of those institutions are thriving today as never before.

jgardner@nysun.com

Until September 30 (170 Central Park West, between 76th and 77th streets, 212-873-3400).