Blasted Tree
Medium
Oil on canvas
Dimensions
43.2 × 35.6 cm (17 × 14 in.)
Classification
painting
Department
Arts of the Americas
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Accession Number
129639
Rights
Public Domain
About this artwork
Like his fellow Hudson River School landscapists, Jasper Cropsey sketched in nature and then combined motifs he had observed into his compositions in his New York studio. In the late 1840s and early 1850s he traveled frequently to the Catskills, where he produced this oil sketch. Here, the gnarled trunk and branches of the weather-beaten tree offered the artist interesting variations of color, tone, and line. Cropsey often included such old trees in his paintings in emulation of Thomas Cole, who...
About the Artist
Jasper Francis Cropsey · 1823–1900
Jasper Francis Cropsey (1823–1900) was an American landscape painter associated with the Hudson River School, the influential mid-nineteenth-century movement that celebrated the natural grandeur of the American continent in large, luminous canvases. Born on Staten Island, New York, Cropsey initially trained as an architect — a background that gave him a strong sense of spatial structure and formal...