NEW YORK—Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton reportedly bought a 19th century Asher B. Durand painting from the New York Public Library for more than $35 million, the most ever paid for an American painting.

Walton plans to display the 1849 painting, Kindred Spirits, in a museum being built by the Walton Family Foundation in Bentonville, Arkansas, where the discount store empire was founded in 1951, The New York Times reported Thursday.

The purchase price far exceeded the previous record for an American painting: $27.5 million for Polo Crowd by George Bellows, paid by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates in 1999, according to Sotheby's auction house, which handled the sale.

Walton outbid the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, which made a joint bid for the painting, considered a prime specimen of the so-called Hudson River School of painting.

Kindred Spirits shows painter Thomas Cole and poet William Cullen Bryant standing together on a rock overhang in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York. The two are framed by a mountain vista, leafy trees and blue sky.

It was painted as a gift for Bryant and was commissioned by Jonathan Sturges. Bryant's daughter, Julia, donated it to the library early in the 20th century.

The Walton museum, called Crystal Bridges, is scheduled to open in 2009. It will present a view of U.S. history "through the eyes of the nation's most influential artists," according to a statement released Thursday by the Walton Family Foundation.

Copyright 2005 AP