Jasper Francis Cropsey : “Pompton Plains, New Jersey” (1867)

Jasper Francis Cropsey was a Hudson River School painter whose works were rediscovered by collectors and galleries during the 1960s. His poor health as a young boy afforded him periods of absence from school, during which he taught himself to draw. Later, he trained as an architect while learning to paint in watercolor and oil. He met Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand, Frederic Edwin Church and George Inness on sketching excursions along the Eastern Seaboard, and toured to Europe in 1847. His art reflects a conception of nature as an emanation of the divine, and a patriotic affinity for the unspoiled qualities of the American landscape.

Pompton Plains, New Jersey looks west across the Pequannock (now Pompton) River, with the Appalachian range in the distance. The Metropolitan Museum of Art cites it as an example of the “aerial luminism that marked much of the work of the second-generation Hudson River School, ” noting “the providential overtone of the all-pervasive light falling on the landscape…detectable in the focal detail of the church steeple near the horizon at center.”