Jasper Cropsey (1823-1900), "Autumn Sunset," ca. 1870-75, oil on canvas, 23 x 34 inches
Lisa N. Peters
We have a new painting by the Hudson River School artist Jasper Cropsey (1823-1900) at the gallery, entitled Autumn Sunset. Art historian Kenneth W. Maddox (who is preparing the Cropsey catalogue raisonné for publication by the Newington-Cropsey Foundation) identifies the work as among Cropsey’s many views based on Greenwood Lake, in northern New Jersey, where the artist’s wife’s family had a home, and where Cropsey painted often from the 1840s through the 1890s. The painting can be linked with a number of images Cropsey created of this site in the early 1870s. A comparable work is Greenwood Lake, New Jersey of 1871, which belongs to the New York Historical Society.
Jasper Cropsey, "Greenwood Lake, New Jersey," 1871, oil on canvas, 20 x 33 inches, New York Historical Society, The Robert L. Stuart Collection
The Historical Society’s painting features two small boats on the lake, while no overt signs of cultivation are present in Autumn Sunset, but the vantage points and compositions are similar in the two works. In the left foregrounds of both, a large oak tree stands prominently, its leaves set in relief against the sky. The season is earlier and the time of day later in Autumn Sunset than in Greenwood Lake, while the hills in the distance are differently configured in the two works, which may have to do with Cropsey’s outlook on the scene or may reflect the way that he took liberties with his subjects. Branches in both paintings–both bare and bearing leaves–hang over the water, their forms silhouetted so as to draw our attention to the reflected light in the lake’s surface. Are the bare branches a subtle reference by Cropsey to the work of Thomas Cole, whose many images of gnarled trees expressed a romantic awareness of time’s passage?
There is an elegiac mood to Cropsey’s Greenwood Lake scenes from the 1870s such as Autumn Sunset. These works, as in those of the previous decade, tout the beauty of America as manifested best when our countryside is dressed in its autumnal finery, its richness enhanced by the light of sunset. However, in the wake of the Civil War, such images perhaps express the sense of sadness at how this tragedy had dimmed the earlier sense of optimism about the nation that landscape painting had voiced.
Greenwood Lake today, from Greenwood Lake News, West Milford, New Jersey
Cropsey initially visited Greenwood Lake, which straddles Orange County, New York, and Passaic County, New Jersey, on the invitation of the New York art dealer John P. Rider. Rider introduced Cropsey to his future wife Maria Cooley (1829-1906), whose family lived in a town on the lake and with whom Cropsey stayed while visiting the area. His first painting of this locale, View in Orange County, with Greenwood Lake in the Distance, After a Sketch Taken October 4, near Sundown (1845; location unknown) earned him membership in the National Academy of Design. He wrote of Greenwood Lake in 1892:
I lived at Greenwood Lake during the summer for a number of years and I formed a strong attachment to the place. It has been the origin of many of my pictures. It is a beautiful sheet of water in the northern part of the state of New Jersey, with about one half of it extending into New York. In earlier times when it was more of a wilderness, than now—it was called “Double Pond.” The low-land and island that spread out in the center of it divide it, and give it the appearance of two lakes. And now that it has become a fashionable summer resort some people call it “Wundermere.”
Jasper Cropsey, letter to Mr. C. Thompson, Sedalia, Illinois, September 11, 1892, quoted in Carrie Rebora, Jasper Cropsey Watercolors (New York: National Academy of Design, 1985).
