Wal-Mart heiress Alice L. Walton has bought an Asher B. Durand painting from the New York Public Library for what unnamed sources say is more than $35 million, the New York Times reports.

Sotheby's acted as the agent for the library, which announced last month that it would sell certain artworks to bolster its endowment and generate income for acquisitions of important books and collections. The auction house declined to confirm the exact purchase price but said it far eclipsed the previous auction record for an American painting, which was set in 1999 when Bill Gates bought George Bellows' Polo Crowd for $27.5 million. Two experts, speaking anonymously, said the price exceeded $35 million.

Walton outbid the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., which made a joint bid for the painting, Kindred Spirits, considered one of the finest examples of the Hudson River School style. "We're disappointed that the painting is leaving New York," said Met spokesman Harold Holzer.

Walton plans to exhibit the painting in a museum that's being built in Bentonville, Arkansas, where her father, Sam Walton, opened his first store in 1951. Kindred Spirits, which depicts the painter Thomas Cole and the poet William Cullen Bryant standing on a rocky ledge overlooking the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York, was commissioned by Jonathan Sturges as a gift for Bryant, whose daughter, Julia, donated it to the library early in the twentieth century. In a statement released by the Walton Family Foundation, which is bankrolling the new museum, Walton described the painting as a "national treasure" and said she intended to lend it to major museums around the country and hoped to work with New York museums to "ensure that it continues to be shown there in the future."