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One of our finest mid-century landscape painters, Jasper F. Cropsey was a major figure in the Hudson River School and a renowned architect.
Born in Rossville, Staten Island, the artist showed an early interest in drawing and architecture. At the age of fourteen, he was awarded diplomas from the New York Mechanics’ Institute and the American Institute of the City of New York. The architect Joseph Trench offered Cropsey a five-year apprenticeship in his New York office and encouraged his talent for drawing and painting by supplying him with artist's materials. In l840, Trench hired Edward Maury, a now obscure British painter, to give the young architect watercolor lessons. That instruction, along with several classes in life drawing at the National Academy of Design, constitute Cropsey's formal artistic education.
The artist opened his own architectural practice in New York in 1843, the same year he first exhibited at the National Academy of Design, but by late 1845, he was devoting himself entirely to landscape views of the Catskills, the White Mountains, and the region around Greenwood Lake, New Jersey.
Newly married in l847, Cropsey and his wife left for a two-year sojourn in Italy. On their return to New York, the artist began to produce paintings from sketches he had made on his travels. He soon turned to American scenery, however, emulating the style and technique of his predecessors, Thomas Cole and Asher B. Durand, whom he greatly admired.
Cropsey returned to Europe in l856, this time to spend eight years in England. The crisp, detailed style that he began to show there owes much to the Pre-Raphaelite "truth-to-nature" concepts then in vogue and won him accolades from the foreign press as well as the English royalty. When he exhibited Autumn--On the Hudson River (1860; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) at a London gallery, Cropsey gained renown on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean that endured throughout the 1860s.
The financial success Cropsey received enabled him to begin to design and build his dream house, Aladdin, in Warwick, New York. By the 1870s, however, his painting career, along with those of his Hudson River School colleagues, was becoming progressively less lucrative, and he returned to architecture to support his family. His work from the last fifteen years of his life, much of it in watercolor, is evidence that Cropsey maintained his lifelong enthusiasm for the idealized, optimistic view of American landscape.
A large collection of Cropsey’s works belongs to the Newington-Cropsey Foundation in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York. The artist is also represented in numerous important private and public collections including the Fogg Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City; the National Gallery Art, Washington, D.C.; the New York Historical Society, New York; the Albany Institute, New York; the Cleveland Museum; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia.
LB
*The essay herein is the property of Spanierman Gallery LLC and is copyrighted by Spanierman Gallery LLC and may not be reproduced in whole or in part, without written permission from Spanierman Gallery LLC nor shown or communicated to anyone without due credit being given to Spanierman Gallery LLC.
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