The group constitutes a major prehistoric cultural landscape which gives a graphic depiction of life in this remote archipelago in the far north of Scotland some 5, 000 years ago.
Durand's painting "Kindred Spirits" (1849), a depiction of the poet William Cullen Bryant and the painter Thomas Cole in a Catskills landscape, in a closed auction something New Yorkers considered a betrayal of their artistic and literary patrimony.