This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  The following is excerpted from The New York Times, May 27, 2001,
"Vistas Revisited: Landscapes in Oil and Life" By Kirk Johnson
WARWICK, N.Y. Sometimes a view can change a life. A person climbs a hill,
gazes out at the landscape, and is never quite the same. A vista has become a vision.
It
happened about 150 years ago to a landscape painter named Jasper
Francis Cropsey, then a rising star of the Hudson River School of art,
who wandered one day onto a hilltop that the Indians called Noonantum,
just south of the Catskills. It happened again in the 1930's, when a
young Polish immigrant named John Woloszczak hiked up to the abandoned
ruins of the Cropsey homestead and stood in the spot though he didn't
know it at the time where the artist had painted a view of "Mounts Adam
and Eve," shimmering in the distance across Warwick Valley.
One
was a shy, socially awkward man who became famous for his ability to
depict the seasons. The other studied for the priesthood and
painted houses for a living. What unites them and their families across
time and space is a singular, transcendent view, and the rocky hilltop
that came to embody it. "Family
follows family," said Katherine Woloszczak (pronounced WOL-a-check),
describing the process that led to her family's establishment here over
the last half century.
Mrs. Woloszczak, who is 86, said the
hill and the view that inspired her husband, John, have been like an
anchor holding everything and everyone together. Mr. Woloszczak died
three years ago at age 88, but four of their grandchildren are now
preparing to build homes behind hers, starting this summer, and it's
their presence, she said, that keeps her alive. "I think I would be
dead, too, a long time, without family," she said.
A painting
is ultimately a closed world, bound by its frame a self-contained story
that begins and ends. But the tale of Noonantum Hill part of the
necklace of vales and promontories that came to define the Hudson River
School suggests that real-world beginnings and ends are not so neat.
What happened here more than a century ago a reaction of light and
perspective that artists like Cropsey believed was special on this
continent is still very much unfolding.
For the Cropsey and the Woloszczak families, the link was provided by an old
woman
named Mrs. MacPherson. No one seems to remember her first name; only
that she was tiny and ancient and arrived one day in the 1950's, when
the
Woloszczaks
had just moved the 50 or so miles from Manhattan to Warwick. Did
they know who had once lived on this hilltop, she asked them? Did
they know
whose home was up there moldering in those trees? They didn't,
and she
told them. And then she told them who Cropsey was because they had
never heard of him, either, said John Woloszczak Jr., John and
Katherine's youngest son.
Mrs. MacPherson said she had grown
up playing with Cropsey's daughters in the 1870's. Her father had been
a tanner who had come to the Cropsey place to collect his pelts or
empty his traps, and she told the Woloszczaks her memories as a child
of being invited into the Cropsey house for cookies.
She gave
them a grainy black-and-white family photograph taken in the 1880's and
showed them art-book images of the view of "Mounts Adam and Eve" their
view, as the Woloszczaks thought of it, made famous before any of them
were born.
And so what had simply been "the old mansion," as
the Woloszczaks had called it until then, gradually became something
more. They began collecting books about Cropsey. Photographs and
architectural plans of the house, which the artist designed himself and
called Aladdin, began to pile up, and that allowed the children to
trace on the forest floor the places where specific rooms had been,
like Cropsey's studio.
The
odd trees that the family had noticed all over their hill oak and pine
and maple trees with leaves as big as dinner plates that don't normally
grow here were Cropsey's trees, the family realized. And so they became
special, too. The ruins and their association with the life of
this one artist became part of the identity of the property, and the
Woloszczak family history became linked with a kind of artistic
resonance that hung over everything.
In search of society's values, The Hudson River School became part
of the national consciousness in the early-to mid-1800's through its
single-minded belief
that places like Noonantum were important. On the borderlands
between
wilderness and civilization, a society's values were to be found, the
painters said, and they took America with them on their search.
From the Adirondack
Mountains to Long Island Sound, they brought back a world that was
being transformed even as they captured it by industry and agriculture,
by the railroads and, as many people in those days put it, by the march
of progress.
There are, of course, things of value in this
world beyond the visual pyrotechnics of a landscape, and perhaps that
is the ultimate thread that ties
together the Cropsey and Woloszczak stories. No matter how much the
view inspired them, what brought the artist and the immigrant to this
hill was love. In that respect, they were kindred spirits.
Both men
married New Jersey women, and it was through their wives that they
first came to these woods. Cropsey's wife, born Maria Cooley,
grew up
around Greenwood Lake, N.J., a few miles south of Warwick, and he first
came to the area and painted deliriously happy scenes of her family's
home on the lake in the 1840's.
John
Woloszczak came because his wife's sisters, who had grown up on a farm
in East Brunswick, N.J., had found jobs during the Depression in a
Warwick resort hotel.
But for Cropsey, the happy days he envisioned at Aladdin were not to be. The
completion in 1869 of his 29-room home coincided with a precipitous decline
in
sales, and the prices of his paintings and those of other artists of the
Hudson River School. The carnage of the Civil War, art experts say, had
shattered the idea for many people that nature could solve mankind's
ills and evils.
The
postwar mavericks of art favored looser,
more personal styles and looked upon older painters like Cropsey as
dinosaurs. Between 1865 his most successful year as a painter, when he
sold nine paintings for a total of $9,000 and the 1880's, his fortunes
almost collapsed. In the mid-1880's, he auctioned off 67 paintings,
including a dozen by his daughter, Lily, and received only $2,700. The
season had truly changed.
In
a letter to his wife in early November 1880, while she was in New York
City trying to raise money, Cropsey wrote of his troubles paying the
bills, and how he had clumsily hammered both thumbs working on the
house and could no longer paint. He was 57, ill and nearly broke. "Will
it ever grow better? Will the silver lining ever show itself?" Cropsey
wrote. "Will good fortune ever smile on you and me again?" Three years
later, the Cropseys sold Aladdin and moved into a smaller house in
Hastings-on-Hudson, in Westchester County, where he lived until his
death in 1900 at age 77. Mrs. Cropsey died several years later.
Little
remains of the Cropsey home today but for a ragged outline of
foundation stones the house burned in a spectacular fire in 1909, after
the Cropseys had moved and it had been renamed Barr Castle, but those
stones have gradually become the centerpiece of the Woloszczak family
circle.
The perspective of "Mounts Adam and Eve," which
Cropsey painted over and over from his front yard perhaps as many as a
dozen times, though only about half of those are known to exist is
still recognizable. A middle school and a high school are now clustered
on the valley floor below the hill both recently expanded as the
town has grown. And while the farms are mostly gone, a broad swath of
trees still nestles the valley, and the mountains beyond look just as
he painted them.
Katherine
Woloszczak said she often sits before her huge bay window these days,
just looking out. The window dominates much of the northwest side
of her little house, as though the window was conceived of first, to
frame the scene, and the house added only later for support. "I
think maybe that this was given to us from God," she said.
| |
This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  Born on Staten Island, New York, Jasper Cropsey became a nationally
known luminist landscape painter whose work reflects his interest in
architecture and allegorical
progression, seasons, etc. Called "America's painter of autumn", he was
especially known for his sunlit-ridden fall landscapes.
Reportedly the
peak of his career was the creation of a "nine-foot-long canvas of a
New York autumn. Its brilliant colors stunned many of the English
viewers to whom it was presented in London." (Zellman 202) His
painting, Autumn on the Hudson River, was so well received in England
that Queen Victoria granted him an audience.
Cropsey had early
success, being acclaimed by the press when he was in his twenties. He
was trained in architecture, having been apprenticed to an architect
when he was age 15, but he turned to landscape painting, which was then
gaining acceptance. He was an admirer of landscape painter Thomas Cole
and used Cole's Roman studio when studying in Italy from 1847-49.
Although Cole was deceased by then, Cropsey adopted Cole's colorful
palette and romantic treatment of subject matter.
He lived most
of his life at Hastings-on-Hudson, overlooking the Hudson River and
traveled and painted extensively in the river valley. However, from
1856 to 1863, he lived in England where the influence of Frederic E.
Church replaced Cole.
Source:
Michael David Zellman, 300 Years of American Art
|
Biography from Hollis Taggart Galleries (Artists, A-D):
| Jasper Francis Cropsey, in the company of Frederic Edwin Church, Asher
B. Durand, and John F. Kensett, was one of the most respected painters
of the Hudson River School. At the peak of his career—from the
mid-1840s through the 1870s—Cropsey enjoyed fame in both England and
the United States for his views of American scenery, particularly his
richly colored canvases capturing the glories of the American autumn.
Born
on Staten Island, New York, on February 18, 1823, Cropsey trained to be
an architect. At the age of thirteen he made and submitted a
scale model of a country house to the annual exhibition of the
Mechanics’ Institute in New York City. His model won a medal and
brought the youth to the attention of New York architect Joseph
Trench. Cropsey served a five-year apprenticeship with Trench,
who encouraged him to embellish his architectural drawings with
landscape backgrounds and figures. To this end, Trench enabled
Cropsey to study drawing with the landscape painter Edward Maury.
Although
the practice of architecture supported Cropsey throughout the 1840s, it
was the rendering of his designs on paper rather than the design
process itself that ignited his passion. His success with the
watercolor medium kindled a desire to paint with oils, which Cropsey
took up in 1841. He learned to handle the new medium by copying
from existing works of art, which included his own watercolors as well
as Dutch paintings and engravings of paintings by Claude Lorrain.
In 1843 he participated for the first time in an exhibition at the
National Academy of Design. He was made an associate of the
Academy the following year on the merits of View of Orange County with
Greenwood Lake in the Distance. Cropsey had discovered Greenwood Lake
in southeastern New York State by 1843. He opened a studio there
and began submitting views of the lake to various exhibitions in New
York. Cropsey’s attachment to the area was an enduring one.
In 1866, he purchased a forty-five-acre tract outside the village of
Warwick near Greenwood Lake where he constructed Aladdin, a 29-room
Gothic Revival mansion with studio.
Following his marriage in
the spring of 1847, Cropsey and his bride, Maria Cooley, embarked upon
a two-year European honeymoon. They spent the summer in England
before traveling through Italy with American painters Christopher
Pearse Cranch and Thomas Hicks and sculptor William Wetmore
Story. During a lengthy stay in Rome, Cropsey worked out of the
former studio of Thomas Cole, the founding father of the Hudson River
School.
Upon his return to the United States in the summer of 1849, Cropsey
settled down to painting as a full-time occupation. He shared a
studio with Edwin White at 114 White Street in New York City, where he
taught and worked up his European sketches into finished oils.
His pupils included the gifted American landscapist David
Johnson. Cropsey made frequent sketching trips to the White
Mountains, the Catskill Mountains, Greenwood Lake, and Newport, Rhode
Island. This productive and rewarding period culminated in
Cropsey’s rise to academician status in the National Academy in 1851.
In
June 1856 the Cropseys again went abroad, this time renting a home and
studio in the Kensington section of London. The artist arrived with
commissions from American patrons for paintings of castles and abbey
ruins, thus he traveled a great deal through the English
countryside. He found, in turn, that his American subjects were
just as eagerly desired abroad. The London printer Gambert and
Company commissioned thirty-six views from Cropsey for publication in
American Scenery.
During his seven years in England, Cropsey
kept company with leading figures in the British art world, including
the director of the National Gallery, Sir Charles Eastlake, and author
John Ruskin, leader of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, who influenced a
generation of American and British painters through his advocacy of
painting natural objects in their natural settings. While abroad,
Cropsey began exhibiting the autumnal scenes that would become his
hallmark. His monumental Autumn—On the Hudson River of 1860
(National Gallery of Art, Washington D. C.) was lauded by Queen
Victoria and the London press, earning Cropsey trans-Atlantic repute as
“America’s painter of autumn.”
Shortly after his return to America, Cropsey undertook American Autumn, Starruca Valley, Erie Railroad,
a large painting celebrating a prosperous nation newly at peace.
A chromolithograph after the painting was published by Thomas Sinclair
of Philadelphia, which immediately put Cropsey’s work within easy reach
of a mass market. He was commissioned by Milton Courtright to
paint Valley of Wyoming (1865, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New
York), a painting measuring seven feet in width. The sale of
these paintings gave him the money necessary to build Aladdin.
By the 1880s, Cropsey could no longer afford what had become an extravagant lifestyle. Aladdin
was sold by his creditors, and in June 1885 the Cropseys settled in a
modest home in the town of Hastings-on-Hudson, New York. Cropsey
began painting the Hudson River and the Palisades, the rocky
outcroppings on the Hudson’s west bank that are visible from
Hastings. Although his landscape subject matter remained the
same, his palette became increasingly high-keyed as a result of his
contact with the English Pre-Raphaelites.
Cropsey died at Hastings-on-Hudson on June 22, 1900. His home there has
been preserved as a center for the study of Cropsey and his art.
Cropsey
was a founding member of the American Water Color Society in
1866. His other memberships included the Century Club, the Lotos
Club, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Artists Aid
Society. Major examples of his work are in the collections of the
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Peabody Institute, Baltimore; the New-York
Historical Society; Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts; the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and the National Gallery of Art,
Washington, D. C.
|
Biography from Newman Galleries:
| Jasper Cropsey was a mid-nineteenth century painter and architect known
for his detailed, romantic autumn landscapes. A member of the Hudson
River School, he reached his artistic peak in 1860 with a
nine-foot-long canvas of a New York autumn landscape. Its brilliant
colors stunned many of the English viewers to whom it was presented in
London.
Cropsey was born on Staten Island, New York, in 1823. He
was trained in mechanical drafting and apprenticed at the age of 15
under architect Joseph Trench. He developed a strong interest in
painting and took lessons in watercolors.
In 1841, he began
doing landscapes in oil, painting scenes of the White Mountains, the
Catskill Mountains, and areas around Greenwood Lake in New
Jersey. In 1942, he left Trench’s office to devote himself to
painting, although he continued to work as an architect.
Cropsey
went to Europe in 1847, and in 1856 went to England where he stayed for
seven years. While there, he painted one of his greatest works, Autumn-
On the Hudson River (1860, National Gallery of Art), which received
critical raves and rated Cropsey an audience with Queen Victoria.
From
then on, Cropsey specialized in fall scenes, earning the nickname
“America’s painter of Autumn.” In the later years of his life, Cropsey
settled on the Hudson River at Hastings, New York, painting oil and
watercolor views of his favored river.
He continued some
architectural work throughout his life; among his designs was the
Victorian-style Sixth Avenue elevated station in New York City.
Jasper
Cropsey died in 1900. His work is in numerous public collections,
including those of Harvard University; the Metropolitan Museum of Art;
the National Gallery of Art; and the New York Historical Society. |
| ** If you discover credit omissions or have additional information to add, please let us know at registrar@AskART.com. |
|
|
|
|
|
|