Pompton Plains, New Jersey

Jasper Francis Cropsey

1867 · Oil on canvas · The American Wing

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.

Artist

Jasper Francis Cropsey

Date

1867

Medium

Oil on canvas

Culture

American

Department

The American Wing

Credit line

Bequest of Collis P. Huntington, 1900