Looking south from near his studio-home in North Hastings-On-Hudson, artist Jasper Francis Cropsey enjoys and shares the view with all in this important composition of the Hudson River's multiple environments. Across to the Palisades, numerous yachts of diverse rigs sail amongst a Hudson River Sidewheel Steam Boat. The artist has most likely captured a yacht club sponsored cruise on the water well north of New York City proper. On Cropsey's east bank of the Hudson, the American Autumn is in full swing, and a man works on the local pier dock while a small herd of cows wander their repetitive trail.
It is a soothing composition, and one that was well familiar with the artist. He painted variations on this theme over at different times in his prodigious and prolific career. One exists in the Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute in Utica, New York, that shows the same small dock in a simple composition. His exceptional skill at depicting the changing state of nature kept Cropsey as a popular choice with the public even after the critics had all but abandoned the Hudson River style artists at the end of the 19th Century for the rising swell of the Plein-Air and Impressionists Schools. Cropsey himself would not compromise, and stuck with exacting details and innovative, self-taught techniques to enhance his paintings. On this particular canvas, he has purposely left void stretches of primed canvas to give his atmospheric distance and ethereal qualities in contrast to the solid presence of the foliage on the close shore.
The quality of this painting is such that Dr. Ken Maddox, of The Newington-Cropsey Foundation thought possibly that it could have been Cropsey's 1894 Exhibition piece in the National Academy of Design. The primary counter to this is that Maddox wrote that Cropsey asked $200 for that particular work, and he was selling other 16 x 30 inch paintings for $300 at that time. There once was a label verso on the original stretcher bar that would have been definitive on whether this the Academy piece of that year or not. It is a beautifully presented work, and one that will enhance any collection of which it becomes part.
