Biografia
Jasper Cropsey nacque in una cittadina dello Stato di New York (Isola di Staten Island), nella fattoria di suo padre, Jacob Rezeau Cropsey, primo di otto figli.
Da ragazzo fu di salute cagionevole, e pertanto, quando non era in grado di andare a scuola, imparò da solo a disegnare stando in casa. I suoi primi tentativi erano degli schizzi architettonici e dei paesaggi, tracciati su un blocco note o sui margini dei libri scolastici.
Educato come un futuro architetto, Cropsey aprì un suo studio nel 1843, ma seguì i corsi della National Academy of Design per studiare acquarello e disegno dal vero sotto la guida di Edward Maury.
Nel 1844 esibì per la prima volta i suoi lavori in seno all'Accademia.
Appena un anno dopo fu nominato membro associato dell'Accademia stessa e, da quel momento, si dedicò esclusivamente alla pittura dei paesaggi. Poco tempo dopo espose i suoi quadri in una mostra intitolata "Italian Compositions".
Nel 1847 Cropsey sposò Maria Cooley e si recò con lei in Europa, fermandosi due anni, dal 1847 al 1849, per visitare l'Inghilterra, la Francia, la Svizzera e l'Italia. Al suo ritorno, nel 1851, l'Accademia lo elesse membro effettivo.
Cropsey fu amico personale di Henry P. Tappan, presidente dell'Università del Michigan dal 1852-1867, e proprio su invito di costui egli si recò nel 1855 ad Ann Arbor dove realizzò due quadri: L'osservatorio di Detroit e una vista del paesaggio del Campus.
Lo stesso anno ripartì per l'Europa dove rimase, questa volta, per sette anni, risiedendo a Londra. Inviò i suoi lavori alla Royal Academy e all'Expo del 1862.
Tornato in patria aprì uno studio a New York e si specializzò in paesaggi autunnali delle regioni del Nord-Est, spesso idealizzati e realizzati con colori vivaci.
Nel 1866, assieme ad altri dieci artisti, co-fondò l'American Society of Painting in Watercolors.
Nel 1869 Cropsey fece costruire un palazzo in stile neogotico di 29 stanze a Warwick, che chiamò Aladdin. Visse quindi a New York City, ma con frequenti periodi a Warwick, fino a che vendette il palazzo nel 1884.
Nel 1885 decise di lasciare la grande città per trasferirsi ad Hastings-on-Hudson, un villaggio nella Contea di Westchester.
Morì nel 1900, a 77 anni, dimenticato ed anonimo.
Cropsey e sua moglie sono sepolti nello Sleepy Hollow Cemetery a Sleepy Hollow.
La sua casa con il suo studio, che aveva chiamato Ever Rest, e che conteneva la più vasta collezione delle sue opere, vennero aperti al pubblico dalla Newington-Cropsey Foundation.
Soltanto dopo sessanta anni dalla sua scomparsa Cropsey fu "riscoperto" dai collezionisti e dai galleristi.
Oggi i suoi quadri si trovano nei maggiori musei americani.
L'opera pittorica di Cropsey
Durante tutta la sua vita Cropsey mantenne vivo il suo interesse per l'Architettura ed essa ebbe una notevole influenza sul suo stile. Ciò appare più evidente nella cura con cui egli delineava i profili e le forme. Ma Cropsey è comunque assai più noto per il suo vivo cromatismo che esprimeva in una generosa profusione di colori.
In quanto artista della prima generazione della
Hudson River School, dipinse paesaggi autunnali che colpiscono l'osservatore per la loro audacia e vivacità cromatica. Cropsey, d'altronde, fu sempre convinto che la rappresentazione del paesaggio fosse la più alta forma d'arte, poiché la natura è una diretta manifestazione del Creatore.
Egli, inoltre, avvertì uno stretto legame fra la natura stessa e il carattere della sua patria, concependo i suoi quadri come la raffigurazione delle rudi, selvagge e incontaminate qualità dell'America.
I musei
Fra i principali musei che accolgono oggi opere di Jasper Cropsey vi sono:
National Gallery of Art
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Detroit Institute of Art
Timken Museum of Art di San Diego
Honolulu Museum of Art
Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco
Denver Art Museum
Princeton University Art Museum
Museum of Fine Arts di Boston
Opere di Jasper Cropsey sono presenti all'interno della Casa Bianca. | © Wikipedia
Jasper Francis Cropsey was born February 18, 1823, on his father's farm in Rossville, Staten Island, New York. He was the eldest of eight children in a family descended from Dutch and French Huguenot immigrants.
In 1837, at the age of fourteen, Cropsey won a diploma at the Mechanics Institute Fair of the City of New York for a model house that he built. That same year he was apprenticed to the architect Joseph Trench for a five year period. After eighteen months, Cropsey, who had shown an early proficiency in drawing, found himself responsible for nearly all of the office's finished renderings.
Impressed with his talents, his employer provided him with paints, canvas, and a space in which to study and perfect his artistic skills.
During this period Cropsey took lessons in watercolor from an Englishman, Edward Maury, and was encouraged and advised by American genre painters William T. Ranney (1813-1857) and William Sidney Mount (1807-1868).
It was in 1843 that Cropsey first exhibited a painting at the National Academy of Design, a landscape titled Italian Composition, probably based on a print, which was quite well received.
He was elected an associate member of that institution the following year and a full member in 1851.
After leaving Trench's office in 1842 and while supporting himself by taking commissions for architectural designs, Cropsey had begun to make landscape studies from nature. A two-week sketching trip to New Jersey resulted in two paintings of Greenwood Lake that were shown at the American Art Union in 1843.
It was during one of his several subsequent trips to Greenwood Lake that the artist met Maria Cooley, to whom he was married in May 1847. The couple left for an extensive European tour immediately thereafter.
After traveling in Britain for the summer, the Cropseys spent the next year among the colony of American artists settled in Rome.
Upon his return to the United States in 1849, Cropsey first visited the White Mountains and later took a studio in New York City from which he traveled in the summers through New York State, Vermont, and New Hampshire. When sales of his works were low, as they sometimes were in these early days, he would teach to supplement his income. The only one of his pupils to gain substantial recognition, however, was the landscape painter David Johnson (1827-1908).
In June 1856 Cropsey and his wife sailed for England for the second time and soon thereafter settled into a studio at Kensington Gate in London. There the couple established an active social life, counting among their friends John Ruskin, Lord Lyndhurst, and Sir Charles Eastlake.
Cropsey executed commissions for pictures of English landmarks for patrons in the United States, and painted scenes of America for a British audience. In museums and galleries he was exposed to the naturalistic landscapes of John Constable and the Romantic paintings of J.M.W. Turner. At this time he also explored and recorded the Dorset Coast and the Isle of Wight.
Cropsey returned to America in 1863 and shortly thereafter visited Gettysburg to record the battlefield's topography in a painting. He began to accept architectural commissions once again and produced his best known design, the ornate cast and wrought iron "Queen Anne" style passenger stations (begun 1876) of the Gilbert Elevated Railway along New York's Sixth Avenue. For himself, beginning in 1866, Cropsey built a twenty-nine room mansion in Warwick, New York.
He was forced to sell this home in 1884 but was able to purchase a house at Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, to which he added a handsome studio. Today the site, called Ever Rest, is maintained as a museum by the Newington-Cropsey Foundation.
For fifteen years Cropsey continued to paint in his home on the Hudson. Although he exhibited regularly at the National Academy of Design, his realistic, meticulously detailed, and dramatically composed scenes were eclipsed in popularity by the smaller-scale, softer, mood-evoking landscapes of Barbizon inspired painters such as George Inness (1825-1894).
After suffering a stroke in 1893 Cropsey, a founder of the American Society of Painters in Watercolor (later the American Watercolor Society), turned increasingly to this medium, painting both in watercolor and oil until his death in Hastings-on-Hudson on June 22, 1900.| [This is an edited version of the artist's biography published in the NGA Systematic Catalogue] - © National Gallery of Art, Washington
