Evening,

1855

Before he began to concentrate during the 1860s on the high-keyed portrayals of fall foliage that were to earn him the sobriquet "America’s painter of autumn," Jasper F. Cropsey produced landscapes of a more modulated palette, similar to those of Thomas Cole, twenty-two years his senior, whose work he greatly admired. Originally trained as an architect, Cropsey had exhibited his artwork as early as 1843 at New York’s National Academy of Design, receiving critical acclaim that caused him gradually to supplant one profession for the other. In the academy’s annual exhibition of 1855, he showed a painting entitled <em>A June Morning</em>, which received largely favorable, if general, reviews. Based upon the dissenting but unusually specific critical response of reviewer Clarence Cook, the work on view must have been the image now more generically known as <em>Morning</em>. After broadly deeming the painting "thin and painty," Cook more particularly criticized Cropsey’s sacrifice of "truth" for "mere effect" in his handling of the light illuminating the bridge at center, inconsistent with the sun’s position above — a rather pointed comment to make about an evidently imaginary composition, one by definition more concerned with effect than truth. In spite of Cook’s critical estimation, Cropsey himself thought enough of the work to produce in the following year a related image, <em>Evening</em>, whose complementary subject, size, and distinguishing shape make it likely that the later painting was explicitly conceived as <em>Morning</em>’s pendant. Indeed, when the two are considered together, the very lighting Cook criticized in the earlier picture functions effectively to cohere both images into a daylong chronological narrative, with the sun implicitly passing across the paired canvases from upper left, in <em>Morning</em>, to lower right, in <em>Evening</em>. This type of abbreviated series was one favored by Cole and other artists active around mid-century but later was largely abandoned, as painters, including Cropsey, increasingly gravitated away from the general and allegorical toward the specific and precise in their rendering of the natural world.