| Biography of old oil painting master Jasper Francis Cropsey what we can copy |
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Jasper Francis Cropsey
American Hudson River School painter &
architect
born 1823 - died 1900
Teacher of:
Benjamin Bellows Grant Stone
(1829-1906).
One of America's finest mid-century
landscape painters, Jasper F. Cropsey was a
major figure in the Hudson River School and
a renowned architect. |
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Born in Rossville, Staten
Island, the artist showed an early interest
in drawing and architecture. At the age of
fourteen, Jasper Francis Cropsey was awarded diplomas from the
New York Mechanics’ Institute and the
American Institute of the City of New York.
The architect Joseph Trench offered Cropsey
a five-year apprenticeship in his New York
office and encouraged his talent for drawing
and painting by supplying him with artist's
materials. In l840, Trench hired Edward
Maury, a now obscure British painter, to
give the young architect watercolor lessons.
That instruction, along with several classes
in life drawing at the National Academy of
Design, constitute Cropsey's formal artistic
education. |
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The artist opened his own architectural
practice in New York in 1843, the same year
Jasper Francis Cropsey first exhibited at the National Academy
of Design, but by late 1845, Jasper Francis
Cropsey was devoting
himself entirely to landscape views of the
Catskills, the White Mountains, and the
region around Greenwood Lake, New Jersey. |
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Newly married in l847, Cropsey and his wife
left for a two-year sojourn in Italy. On
their return to New York, the artist began
to produce paintings from sketches Jasper
Francis Cropsey had
made on his travels. Jasper Francis Cropsey soon turned to
American scenery, however, emulating the
style and technique of his predecessors,
Thomas Cole and Asher B. Durand, whom Jasper
Francis Cropsey greatly admired.
Cropsey returned to Europe in l856, this
time to spend eight years in England. The
crisp, detailed style that Jasper Francis
Cropsey began to show
there owes much to the Pre-Raphaelite
"truth-to-nature" concepts then in vogue and
won him accolades from the foreign press as
well as the English royalty. When Jasper
Francis Cropsey exhibited Autumn - On the Hudson River
(1860; National Gallery of Art, Washington,
D.C.) at a London gallery, Cropsey gained
renown on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean
that endured throughout the 1860s.
The financial success Cropsey received
enabled him to begin to design and build his
dream house, Aladdin, in Warwick, New York.
By the 1870s, however, his painting career,
along with those of his Hudson River School
colleagues, was becoming progressively less
lucrative, and Jasper Francis Cropsey returned to architecture
to support his family. His work from the
last fifteen years of his life, much of it
in watercolor, is evidence that Cropsey
maintained his lifelong enthusiasm for the
idealized, optimistic view of American
landscape. |
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A large
collection of Cropsey’s works belongs to the
Newington-Cropsey Foundation in
Hastings-on-Hudson, New York. The artist is
also represented in numerous important
private and public collections including the
Fogg Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge,
Massachusetts; the Metropolitan Museum of
Art, New York City; the National Gallery
Art, Washington, D.C.; the New York
Historical Society, New York; the Albany
Institute, New York; the Cleveland Museum;
the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the
Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Pennsylvania
Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. |
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For FULL catalogue pls click "Catalogue" at the TOP of the page.
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