Jasper Francis Cropsey achieved renown for his dramatic scenes of autumn foliage. A native of Rossville, Staten Island, New York, Cropsey studied architecture and watercolor painting before turning to oils. In 1843 he established an architectural practice in New York City and commenced exhibiting his paintings at the National Academy of Design. Following his marriage in 1847, Cropsey traveled to Europe, visiting the British Isles before moving to Rome. Back in the United States by 1849, the artist spent the next several years sketching in the White Mountains, Greenwood Lake, New Jersey; Newport, Rhode Island; and other locales. A successful auction of work realized enough money for a second stay in Europe, and in 1856 Cropsey settled in London.

Cropsey participated actively in the British art world, gaining the attention of such critics as John Ruskin and earning distinction for his unusual fall landscapes. His painting Autumn on the Hudson River (1860, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC) cemented his reputation both in England and in the United States, and in 1863 he returned home to a successful career as one of New York's most prominent landscapists. In 1869 the artist completed work on his mansion, "Aladdin," at Warwick-on-the-Hudson. As the Hudson River School declined in favor during the 1870s and 1880s, Cropsey increasingly focused on architecture, designing, among other projects, decorations for New York's Seventh Regiment Armory. The artist died at Hastings-on-Hudson in 1900.

Winter Landscape, North Conway, N.H. is a view of the Intervale near North Conway in New Hampshire's White Mountains. Looking south toward Moat Mountain and the prominent escarpments known as Cathedral and White Horse Ledges, the viewer takes in a vista of snow-covered meadows and forests. In the foreground, a man dressed in warm clothes makes his way toward a rustic bridge. Behind him and to the right one can make out the forms of a small house and barn.

In Winter Landscape, the orderly composition and suspiciously picturesque vignettes of farm, bridge, and figure highlight the fact that Cropsey painted this work from imagination while living in England. The artist had already gained favorable notice at the Royal Academy of Arts with an earlier White Mountain view, An Indian Summer Morning in the White Mountains (1857, Currier Museum of Art), and in light of his success, he may have planned a complementary scene of the same region in winter. The Currier's Winter Landscape is a small painting, however, and if Cropsey completed a larger version, it was not exhibited. The artist nevertheless continued to depict White Mountain subjects while in England, and to the Royal Academy exhibition of 1862 he sent a canvas entitled Autumn in the White Mountains, America (unlocated).

The desire to engage the British public may lie behind Cropsey's emphasis on the human element in Winter Landscape. While New Englanders might have seen Cropsey's small, snow-girt farmstead as an emblem of Yankee hardihood, viewers in Old England would have been more likely to look on it as quaintly exotic. At the same time, Cropsey could not have been unaware of the celebrated English painter John Constable (1776-1837), whose epic studies of Dedham raised the imagery of the cultivated landscape to the level of the sublime. Although the lush countryside around Dedham had little in common with the granite-strewn fields below the White Mountains, the figure approaching the rustic bridge in Winter Landscape has direct counterparts in several paintings by Constable, including View on the Stour near Dedham (1822, Egham, Royal Holloway College, University of London), a major canvas that was engraved by David Lucas in 1831. Like Ruskin, Cropsey probably had little patience for Constable's loose brushwork and unorthodox palette, yet he was astute enough to invite favorable comparisons by appropriating motifs from the English landscapist. Other Hudson River School artists such as Thomas Cole (q.v.) and Asher Brown Durand (q.v.) also studied Constable, freely adapting the elements of his style and subject matter to their own work.

Winter Landscape was bequeathed to the Currier Museum of Art in 2002 by Henry Melville Fuller.

VSD

REFERENCES

Ella M. Foshay, Barbara Finney, and Mishoe Brennecke. Jasper F. Cropsey: Artist and Architect. Ex. cat. New-York Historical Society, 1987.

Robert L. McGrath. Gods in Granite: The Art of the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000.

Robert L. McGrath and Barbara J. MacAdam. "A Sweet Foretaste of Heaven": Artists in the White Mountains 1830-1930. Ex. cat. Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, 1988.