The Image size of this print is 16 1/4 X 26 1/4 with ample margins.

IN THE VALLEY by James F Cropsey (American 1823-1900).

Growing up in Staten Island, New York, Jasper Cropsey moved to New York City in 1837 at the age of fourteen, where he was first apprenticed to an architectural firm. Six years later he devoted himself to painting and, possibly as early as 1845, began depicting the autumn season for which he became known. In 1847 Cropsey made the obligatory tour of Europe, but it was during his second, extended trip to London in 1856 that he fully developed his autumn oeuvre. Hailed as having "no superior as a painter of autumnal scenes," Cropsey won great acclaim in England for his monumental Autumn on the Hudson River of 1860 (Metropolitan Museum of Art).

It may have been his English experience that cemented the autumn motif in his work. The nature-loving English, whose autumn seasons lacked the vibrant colors found in America's deciduous trees, were fascinated with the visual delights peculiar to American autumns, where the "forest surpasses all the world in gorgeousness." The British reaction to Cropsey's brilliant hues was often one of incredulity, causing the artist to display preserved autumn leaves pasted on cardboard next to his paintings. Among those applauding the artist's seasonal choice was Henry James, who wrote, "No subject for landscape art was deemed superior to the admirable native �fall.' By the mid-1880s Cropsey had become almost exclusively a painter of autumn scenes, earning the appellation "America's Painter of Autumn." In 1885, at the age of sixty-two, he built a Gothic revival cottage for retirement in Hastings-on-Hudson, which he appropriately named Ever Rest