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Property from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection JASPER FRANCIS CROPSEY (1823-1900) View near...

Currency:USD Category:Everything Else / Other Start Price:NA Estimated At:200,000.00 - 300,000.00 USD
Property from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection JASPER FRANCIS CROPSEY (1823-1900) View near...
Property from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection
JASPER FRANCIS CROPSEY
(1823-1900)
View near Sherburne, Chenango County, New York, 1853
signed and dated "J.F. Crospey 1853" (lower right)
oil on canvas
24 1/4 x 41 1/2 in. (61.5 x 104.8 cm) <p> Estimate: $200,000-300,000 <p> Provenance
Margaret Chapman, Rhinebeck, New York Private Collection, Rhinebeck, New York Du Mouchelles, Detroit Ira Spanierman, Inc., New York Andrew Crispo Gallery, New York, 1980 Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Lugano, Switzerland, 1980 <p> Exhibited
Roslyn, New York, Nassau County Museum of Fine Art, William Cullen Bryant and The Hudson River School of Painting, 1981, (illustrated, pl. 30) Houston, The Museum of Fine Arts; Oklahoma City, Oklahoma Art Center; Omaha, Joslyn Art Museum of Art, Nineteenth-Century American Landscape Painting: Selections from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, October 29, 1982-June 19, 1984, no. 15 (illustrated) Rome, Musei Vaticani, Maestri Americani della Collezione Thyssen-Bornemisza,1983, no. 13 (illustrated) <p> Literature
Holly Joan Pinto, William Cullen Bryant and the Hudson River School of Landscape Painting, Roslyn, new york, 1981, pp. 15, 27, 47 (illustrated as View near Sherbourne, Chenango County, New York) Franklin Kelly, "New England Scenery," catalogue entry in Franklin Kelly and Gerald Carr, The Early Landscapes of Frederic Edwin Church, 1845-1854, Fort Worth, 1987, p. 119 (illustrated as View Near Sherbourne, Chenango County) Barbara Novak, The Thyssen-Bornimisza Collection: Nineteenth-Century American Painting, 1986, London, p. 76, no. 9 (illustrated, p. 77) Angela Miller, The Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation and American Cultural Politics, 1825-1875 , Ithaca and London, 1993, p. 171, no. 9 <p> Related Works Jasper F. Cropsey, View Near Sherburne, Chenango County, New York, 1853, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (exhibited at the National Academy of Design, 1853)
Jasper F. Cropsey, Study of Trees: Sherburne, 1853, unlocated, (exhibited at the National Academy of Design, 1853)
Jasper F. Cropsey, Chenango River, New York, 1856, Private Collection, (exhibited at the National Academy of Design,1856 )
Jasper F. Cropsey, Chenango River, circa 1859, unlocated (for the series of sixteen American Views lithographed by the London publisher E. Gambart) Jasper F. Cropsey, Spring, Chenango Valley, 1859, Private Collection (for the series of sixteen American Views lithographed by the London publisher E. Gambart) <p> This painting will be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the artist's work in preparation by the Newington-Cropsey Foundation, Hastings-on-Hudson, New York. <p> While traveling by train to Niagara Falls in the summer of 1852, Cropsey was impressed by the "Durandish landscape" of western New York with its dense clusters of trees, flat green meadows, and tidy white houses.1 On his return from the falls Cropsey visited his artist friend, Thompkins Harrison Matteson, who had recently moved to Sherburne, New York. He spent a week with Matteson sketching the scenery of Chenango Valley. It is "very beautiful, full of beautiful trees," he wrote to his wife, lamenting that "I wish I had time to stop here a month."2 <p> View near Sherburne, Chenango County, New York, with its towering mountain rising as a backdrop to a bucolic scene teeming with human activity, is far removed from Cropsey's more topographical views of the gentle valley. The canvas, with its shifting perspectives, forms a montage of details celebrating the virtues of industry, harvesting, and leisurely pleasure- including picnicking figures in the right foreground - and takes on a fanciful tone. The enchanting quality of the Chenango Valley was jocundly described by the artist as looking "like the Land of Beulah only I don't see the figures with shining wings,...And the celestial city owing to much dust in the road, and a hazy atmosphere, is not distinctly visible - but I think it may be seen from the church."3 Cropsey was not only referring to Bunyan's epic, but to his own study which he made in 1850 for the Land of Beulah (now entitled Ideal Landscape: Homage to Thomas Cole, Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection) that was utilized for Kyle and Dallas' Panorama of Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. The trees on the right side of View near Sherburne which frame the setting sun, relate specifically to the earlier study for the panorama in which similar trees frame the view of the Celestial City. <p> Cropsey was undoubtedly influenced by Frederic E. Church's New England Scenery, 1851(George Walter Vincent Smith Art Museum, Springfield, Massachusetts), which was exhibited at the American Art Union in 1851 and sold at auction the following year.4 His painting uses the same panoramic format as Church's composition and shares with it such elements as the foreground body of water, towering mountain, mill, bridge, and distant church spire. While in New England Scenery, the Conestoga wagon traveling over the foreground bridge intimates "manifest destiny," the more distant, but almost identical bridge in Cropsey's painting is crossed by a hay wagon, an equally potent symbol expressing the bountifulness of the American land. Cropsey's own display of nationalism is seen in the center foreground of his composition. From the stern of the boat, its sails about to be furled, an American flag trails in the water, allowing Cropsey to reaffirm his intense patriotism within the conventions of the pastoral landscape.
<p> Our thanks to Dr. Kenneth Maddox for cataloguing this lot. <p> Notes 1 Letter, Jasper F. Cropsey to his wife, Maria, August 5, 1852, Newington-Cropsey Foundation, Hastings-on-Hudson, New York. 2 Letter, Jasper F. Cropsey to his wife, Maria, August 29, 1852, Newington-Cropsey Foundation, Hastings-on-Hudson, New York. 3 Letter, Jasper F. Cropsey to his wife, Maria, August 29, 1852, Newington-Cropsey Foundation, Hastings-on-Hudson, New York. 4 Cropsey, who was obviously jealous over the high price New England Scenery commanded at the American Art-Union auction, complained to his wife in a letter dated December 15, 1852 (Newington-Cropsey Foundation, Hastings-on-Hudson, New York), that the picture "is greatly overrated - but it possesses all those qualities which suit the public."
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