Farm on the Hudson

Object Details

Object Essay

Although he was a second-generation member of the Hudson River School, Jasper F. Cropsey probably painted the landscape of that region as single-mindedly as any artist. He represented all seasons, but he is most closely associated with autumn, whose coppery reds became a seductive trait of his works.         

Born of Dutch immigrants on Staten Island, Cropsey was trained in architecture, a profession he practiced intermittently. He began to paint landscapes when he was eighteen, and he exhibited for the first time in 1843 at the National Academy of Design. From 1847 to 1849, he was in Europe visiting London and Fontainebleau, and he lived in Rome in a studio formerly used by Thomas Cole. Although Cole had died by the time Cropsey returned to America, Cole’s palette, brushwork, motifs, and moods were Cropsey’s models. In 1856, Cropsey went again to England, where he achieved success painting the English countryside, as well as American landscapes from sketches that he had brought with him. He also illustrated volumes of poetry.^{1_{Spassky, 186.}} Upon his return in 1863, he established his studio in New York City. In 1885, he moved to Hastings-on-Hudson and into a new studio he had designed.

Farm on the Hudson, painted in Cropsey’s maturity, appears easy and natural in its composition, and its low, wide format emphasizes the subject’s air of contentment. By this date, Cropsey’s technique was characterized by his fluid handling of oils, which owed much to his increasing use of watercolor. The idyllic mood of this painting is consistent in his oeuvre and unvarying in his late work. It is sustained by a measured picture space and the balance of pure and modulated hues. Cropsey blends sensations of transience and permanence into an ideal reality, creating an aura of well-being that recalls an earlier, pre-industrial America.

William Kloss

Excerpted from Clement E. Conger, et al. Treasures of State: Fine and Decorative Arts in the Diplomatic Reception Rooms of the U.S. Department of State. New York: H.N. Abrams, 1991.