Jasper Cropsey was perhaps the most romantic of the second generation of the Hudson River School artists. As the last of his peers to part from allegorical subject matter (as championed by Thomas Cole) he never fully embraced the scientific realism personified by Frederic Church nor the Pre-Raphaelite quest for Truth, as advocated by John Ruskin. Cropsey instead opted for the overt drama of color, color he would find in the American landscape. Years before the impressionists were to push the boundaries of color, Jasper Cropsey stunned an audience of disbelieving Englishman with a pyrotechnical rendition of the American landscape in his 1860 masterpiece, Autumn on the Hudson (col. National Gallery, Washington, DC). To potential doubters that such magnificent combination of scenery and foliage actually existed, the painting was also presented with a side display of fiery red maples leaves glued onto cardboard as a part of the package. For the rest of his career he would be known as “the Painter of Autumn.”[1]. While he had endured a bankruptcy in the mid 1880’s as the Hudson River School went out of style and sales of his work plummeted, it was in Hastings where the artist found a spiritual oasis and settled to spend his twilight years. His studio there has been preserved and it is now a part of the neighboring Newington-Cropsey Foundation. Landscapes like this with an autumn subject by Cropsey can be seen in the Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New-York Historical Society, the Newark Museum, New Jersey and the Art Institute of Chicago.[2]
