THE HUDSON RIVER SCHOOL REVISITED

Landscape Composition, Italian Scenery

 

THE HUSDON RIVER SCHOOL REVISITED

by Libby Clay

Favorite tour stops among docents are at Asher B. Durand’s Genesee Oaks

 and Thomas Cole’s Landscape Composition: Italian Scenery.

Genesee Oaks

These artists represent, of course, the Hudson River School of painters, artists who recorded both idyllic and dramatic scenery in New York State--the White Mountains, the Berkshires and the Adirondacks--and established the tradition of a national landscape art.

The Hudson River, New York

Further down the corridor, across from the Lockhart Gallery, hang two works by another Hudson River Schooler, Jasper Francis Cropsey. Hung one above the other are The Hudson River, New York (73.39) and Chenango River, New York (73.40)

Chenango River, New York

. They are the same size, and both were painted in 1858, leading one to wonder if they were part of a series. Their small size (10 3/8 x 16 7/8 inches) would make an ideal grouping.

Also on view is American Harvesting, after a Painting by Jasper Cropsey (77.196),

American Harvesting

a  painting  of a print which, in turn, was a copy of a painting by Cropsey--prints were a means of bringing artworks to the general public. This work gives an idea of what the artist’s larger paintings were like: full of color and detail and very American..

Correspondence found in the curatorial files zeroes in on The Hudson River and makes the title (and the location) more specific. In the right foreground can be seen the ruins of a building, probably Fort Putnam, built in 1779 high above the United StatesMilitary Academy at West Point. The view of the river would then be looking north toward Newburgh, with Constitution Island to the right. During the Revolutionary War, a great chain was stretched across the Hudson from West Point to ConstitutionIsland to prevent the British from sailing farther up the river. Some of the enormous links from the chain are preserved at Trophy Point at West Point, and the view of the Hudson from there is very similar to that in Cropsey’s painting.

The location of Chenango River (the area near Binghamton, New York) has also been challenged, the objection being that the area is not as rugged as Cropsey paints it. Although the Hudson River School artists sketched out-of-doors and on site, they were not above embellishing when they felt their painting needed  more drama.  After all, they were painting for a public with a taste for romantic landscapes.

Jasper Francis Cropsey had an interesting career. He was of Dutch-Huguenot stock, born February 18, 1823, in Staten Island, New York. His schooling was sporadic and limited to what the neighborhood could provide. In his teens he was apprenticed to an architect; by age twenty he was a practicing architect. He also began to paint, secretly at first, rising at dawn to work until breakfast, then putting in a full day’s work before painting again until night. His landscapes were very much influenced by the works of Thomas Cole and by Cole’s almost mystical reverence for the American wilderness.

                                                                                                                                                                                                  

In 1847 Cropsey and his wife Maria went to Europe for a year. There he settled with a group of American and European painters and saw firsthand the work of European landscape painters, both contemporary and academic. He himself did no painting there, but he executed numerous sketches which he then turned into paintings when he returned to America.

In 1856 he returned to Europe with Maria and their two daughters. They settled in England for a seven-year sojourn, and he became a close friend of the writer and art critic John Ruskin. Cropsey had brought America with him in the form of his sketches, and he developed oil paintings from them. The best of them, Autumn--on the Hudson River was exhibited in the London Exhibition of 1862. (It is now in the National Gallery in Washington.) The British were astonished by the painting, and could not believe that the full brilliance of American autumn was other than the artist’s fantasy. Cropsey placed a pressed autumn leaf from America next to the painting as proof of his realism. (Maria Cropsey had spent the crossing pressing American leaves and flowers into a book.) Queen Victoria bestowed a medal on him for his services with the American Commission of the great London Exposition.

The American Civil War brought Cropsey home again, and he immediately went to the battlefields with an artist’s ammunition: paint and brush. He also continued his architectural career, designing stations and platforms for the Sixth Avenue Elevated train platforms in New York City, and executing a design for a five-story, multi-family house long before apartment houses were built in America. He also designed private homes, including his own, “Aladdin,” at Warwick, New York.

Jasper Cropsey, though not as well known as Cole and Durand, carried on their tradition of the romantic landscape. His vivid colors, sometimes almost brash, reflected his love of the land and also the profound changes in ideas and ideals that took place in America from the middle decades of the 19^th century to the Civil War:

                1. Regarding the natural world, the feeling changed from a desire to conquer it, as on the frontier, to living in harmony with nature, enjoying it, and respecting it as an expression of God’s grandeur or purpose.

                2. A new outlook emerged on man’s place in the cosmos, and a new notion of what makes up a good life, including the idea that life is a pilgrimage, a voyage.

Eventually American landscape paintings became, by their very nature, somewhat repetitious, and public demand for  them waned. Cropsey lamented the diminishing wilderness as much as the diminishing demand. He sold “Aladdin” and bought a more modest home at Hastings-on-Hudson. He died in 1900, known particularly for his autumn scenes.

His great-granddaughters have turned his home and studio into a Cropsey memorial and center for scholarly and artistic study. It is open by appointment.

Source: Curatorial files; article by M. Therese Southgate, MD, in the Journal of the American Medical Association, October 7, 1998; John K. Howat:The Hudson River and its Painters, Viking Press.