CROPSEY, Jasper Francis (RossvilIe, 1823 – Hastings-on-Hudson, 1900)
Cropsey was trained as an architect, a profession which he continued to exercise at various times throughout his life. He soon became one of the leading landscape painters of the Hudson River School and began to exhibit at the National Academy of Design in New York, to which he was elected member in 1844 following the success of his scenes of Lake Greenwood. Cropsey had visited Lake Greenwood for the first time in 1844 in search of a natural idyll, and from then on it became the main subject of his paintings.
Following his marriage to Maria Cooley, Cropsey left for Europe, and from 1847 to 1849 made the obligatory Grand Tour. In Rome he moved into the studio formerly occupied by Thomas Cole, an artist who influenced him at the start of his career. On his return in 1849, he opened a studio in New York, travelling to other locations during the summer months. He lived and worked in London from 1857 to 1863, where his landscapes enjoyed the same huge success as they had in America. In the English capital Cropsey completed the most ambitious landscape of his career, Autumn on the Hudson River (Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art). This landscape, exhibited at the International Exhibition in London in 1862, led to Cropsey being described as “the painter of the American autumn.”
On his return to America, Cropsey built a palatial residence next to Lake Greenwood. It was situated in a 45-acre property near Warwick and was built in the style of a Victorian mansion. The artist gave it the exotic name of “Aladdin.”
Cropsey’s pictorial style combined broad and theatrical views of the type deployed by the Hudson River School with the detailed rendering of gradations of tone and light. At the end of his career his prestige declined as his highly detailed and realistic compositions with their rather theatrical air were displaced by the smaller-scale works of the young painters influenced by the Barbizon School. The financial problems which this implied led Cropsey to sell “Aladdin” and move to Hastings-on-Hudson, where he installed a new studio, today the home of the Newington-Cropsey Foundation.
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