Some years ago, I gave my parents a framed print of a landscape painting as thanks for taking my young family in during the pandemic. I’d always disliked the New Jersey suburb I grew up in, lined by strip malls, encircled by highways, devoid of beauty—or so I’d thought. Living there again as an adult, albeit briefly, I was surprised to find a few pockets of hidden serenity. My favorite was the Pompton River, once a prime attraction, now all but forgotten. I’d launch my kayak downstream and explore the meandering water, far from worldly cares and concerns.
The print that now hangs in my parents’ kitchen, “Pompton Plains, New Jersey,” painted in 1867 by Jasper Cropsey (it has been in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art since 1900), depicts the bucolic valley the river runs through as seen from a gentle rise—almost exactly where my parents’ home stands. Cows graze in the foreground, mountains loom in the distance, and mottled sunlight bathes the land in gold.
Jasper Cropsey may not be as well-known as other leading lights of the 19th-century Hudson River School—such as Thomas Cole, Asher Durand, and Frederic Church—but he should be. Born in Staten Island in 1823, Cropsey first studied and practiced as an architect, but found himself drawn to painting and spent a few years soaking up classical influences in Europe. He eventually became known as “America’s painter of autumn” for his vivid depictions of the season, especially “Autumn on the Hudson” (1860), which now hangs in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. One critic wrote that the monumental, nine-foot-wide picture (clearly created from a high vantage point looking southeast toward the Hudson and the Storm King Mountains in the distance) which Cropsey painted and first exhibited in London, depicts “not the solemn wasting away of the year, but its joyful crowning festival.” Cropsey even displayed genuine American leaf specimens near the painting to counter British critics who didn’t believe foliage could attain such vibrant colors.
Cropsey’s fortunes declined as the Hudson River School’s realism faded from fashion and modern styles like impressionism took hold. He had to sell his enormous mansion in Warwick, and in 1885 purchased a smaller estate named Ever Rest in Hastings-on-Hudson, where he spent his final years. Though he sold nearly all his paintings to make ends meet, the home remained in the family after Cropsey died in 1900. Decades later, his great-granddaughter began buying up Cropsey’s works, scores of which can be seen by appointment both in the house—on the National Register of Historic Homes and well-preserved with original furniture, some of it designed by Cropsey himself—and in the impressive nearby Gallery of Art (newingtoncropsey.com), constructed in the Gothic Revival style and opened in 1994 on the grounds of the old Hastings garbage dump. Like the Cropsey print in my parents’ kitchen, this unheralded Hudson Valley museum is a tribute to the glory of the American landscape—hidden by the paved-over surface of suburbia, but still there, waiting to be rediscovered and cherished anew.
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