Pompton Plains, New Jersey
Jasper Francis Cropsey American
Not on view
Cropsey had worked six years in England before returning to the United States in 1863, in the midst of the Civil War. At home his work in landscape shifted to spatial compositions such as "Battlefield at Gettysburg" (unlocated), "The Valley of Wyoming" (66.113), and "Pompton Plains, New Jersey". These pictures reflect not only the artist's patriotism but his renewed interest in the aesthetics of his contemporaries, such as Sanford Gifford, whose "Kauterskill Clove" (15.30.62) helped define the aerial luminism that marked much of the work of the second-generation Hudson River School. The providential overtone of the all-pervasive light falling on the landscape here is detectable in the focal detail of the church steeple near the horizon at center.
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