Interpretation
Before he began to concentrate on the high-keyed portrayals of American fall foliage that brought him wide renown, Cropsey produced landscapes of a more modulated palette, similar to those of Hudson River School founder Thomas Cole. In 1855, Cropsey exhibited the painting on the left as A June Morning at New York’s National Academy of Design. It received largely favorable reviews, apparently prompting the artist to produce a related image, Evening, the following year. When the two are considered together, the images cohere into a daylong chronological narrative, with the sun implicitly passing across the paired canvases from upper left, in Morning (as it was later known), to lower right, in Evening. This type of abbreviated series was favored by Cole and other painters active around mid-century, after which American artists gravitated away from the general and allegorical—and toward the specific and precise—in their rendering of the natural world.
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 A June Morning, 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 Morning. 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, Evening, whose complementary subject, size, and distinguishing shape make it likely that the later painting was explicitly conceived as Morning’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 Morning, to lower right, in Evening. 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.
Information
- Title
- Morning
- Object Number
- y1984-31
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Dates
- 1854
- Dimensions
- 44 × 32 cm (17 5/16 × 12 5/8 in.) frame: 59.5 × 48.3 × 9.2 cm (23 7/16 × 19 × 3 5/8 in.)
- Credit Line
- Gift of Stuart P. Feld, Class of 1957, and Mrs. Feld
- Culture
- American
- Signatures
- Signed and dated lower right: J.F. Cropsey/1854/1854/J.F. Cropsey
- "Acquisitions of the Art Museum 1984," Record of the Art Museum, Princeton University 44, no. 1 (1985): p. 24-52., p. 25
- Barbara T. Ross, "Nineteenth-century American landscape paintings: nine recent acquisitions", Record of the Art Museum, Princeton University 44, no. 1 (1985): p. 4-13., p. 6, fig. 5
- Allen Rosenbaum and Francis F. Jones, Selections from The Art Museum, Princeton University, (Princeton, NJ: The Art Museum, Princeton University, 1986), p. 273
- John Wilmerding et al., American Art in the Princeton University Art Museum: volume 1: drawings and watercolors, (Princeton: Princeton University Art Museum; New Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press, 2004), p. 21, fig. 21
- Princeton University Art Museum: Handbook of the Collection (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 229 (illus.)
- Princeton University Art Museum: Handbook of the Collections (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Art Museum, 2013), p. 240
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