Catskill Creek
Medium
Painting
Classification
Painting
Department
Smithsonian Collection
Museum
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Credit
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase
Accession Number
1966.50
Tags
About this artwork
Jasper Francis Cropsey greatly admired the works of Thomas Cole, who was the first American painter to establish the countryâs wilderness as an important subject for painting. In 1850, Cropsey stayed with Coleâs widow in the village of Catskill, where he visited the late artistâs studio and made several sketches of the landscape. (Myers, The Catskills, 1987) In this painting the windswept trees and dark tones of brown and orange evoke the aftermath of a passing storm.
About the Artist
Jasper Francis Cropsey
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...