The image size of this print is 12 x 22 with ample margins.

THE OLD RED MILL 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.'"

Very much a patriot, Cropsey returned to the United States in 1863 amidst the turmoil of the Civil War. He gradually departed from the hard-edged realism of the Hudson River School in favor of the more poetic in�uence of the luminist movement, popular by the 1860s. Sunset, Hudson River is a rather odd marriage of a formulaic Hudson River School composition and this luminist style. In most luminist works the sunlight is evident only in the diffusing effects of its rays, but in this painting the setting sun is a palpable orb. One feels as if the strength of its light could not only diffuse but obliterate forms, achieving what William Talbot has referred to in other Cropsey paintings as a "cosmic omnipotence."

Although the vision of America as the unspoiled Garden of Eden declined after the Civil War, Cropsey continued to paint optimistic landscapes. Sunset, Hudson River seems to assert that God is still in his heaven and all is right with the world. To relate Cropsey's work to a religious theme is not altogether unreasonable. He became an elder in the Dutch Reformed Church later in life. Unlike some in the religious and literary community, who ascribed to the verse in the Book of Isaiah (64:6) that "We all do fade as a leaf," Cropsey did not view autumn with melancholy. Rather, he saw autumn as a glori�cation of life on earth, a colorful celebration from a benevolent God that masked the forthcoming decay.

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. There he painted Sunset, Hudson River just three years before his death. The site appears to be just north of his home overlooking the Palisades, straight cliffs that border the Hudson where there was once was a busy harbor. Cropsey called his view of the Hudson and Palisades "one of the finest passages of scenery of the river."

Like most of the works from the last decade of his life, Sunset, Hudson River is lacking in picturesqueness. In later years Cropsey painted anachronistically, often reverting to a midcentury style. The labored painting technique and awkward recession from foreground to background show a decline in skill attributed to the artist's age and a stroke he suffered in 1891.