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MY WORD - 6/11/2008
(by Holly Stewart - OpEd Columnist - June 11, 2008)
An eye for beauty
"How I have walked... day after day, and all alone, to see if there was not something among the old things which was new!”
--Thomas Cole
On a scorching hot summer’s day last year, my sister and I went to the Brooklyn Museum. We were there to see an exhibit of artists from the Hudson River School featuring Asher Durand and Thomas Cole. This artistic movement thrived throughout the 19th century and brought a spiritual romanticism to the landscape form. Its name stemmed from the fact that much of the scenery captured by these artists was in the Hudson River Valley, although the Catskills, Adirondacks and White Mountains of New Hampshire were also popular subjects. Eventually, artists from this group would paint landscapes from Europe to the Caribbean and everywhere in between, as I was about to learn that day in Brooklyn.
I’ve always admired works from the Hudson River School. Our family has roots throughout upstate New York, from Tarrytown all the way past Kingston. When you love trees and water and the endless abundance of nature’s gifts the way I do, it’s impossible not to feel thrilled by the mastery of light and texture expressed by these artists.
The exhibit did not disappoint. We viewed many amazing, towering portraits of places known and obscure. They seemed to go on and on. There were cows and storm clouds and Indians and children fishing, all set against an endless palette of yellows, greens and blues making up the sky, the forest, the earth and the water. After we had fully toured the display we’d come to see, we continued to enjoy the rest of the museum’s diverse collection. I was about to walk by a subdued mountain setting when a familiar name caught my eye.
I stopped, blinked, and looked at the nameplate again. It read Bareford (sic) Mountains, West Milford, New Jersey, Jasper Cropsey, 1850. My jaw dropped. Just then my sister arrived at my side and her jaw dropped, too. We had almost missed it, this bit of small-world, old-world serendipity in the form of a 150-year-old painting of the very neighborhood where I live. We paused to take it in fully and I made a mental note of the artist’s name. I’d never heard of him before and I was eager to do some research.
Jasper Cropsey was born in Staten Island in 1823. He was trained as an architect and became an associate member of the National Academy of Design in his early 20s. He visited the Greenwood Lake area for the first time in 1843 and married West Milford resident Maria Cooley four years later.
The Cropseys toured Europe several times but eventually came back to settle in this area on a 50-acre parcel in Warwick, New York. Construction of the home, which was dubbed “Aladdin,” was completed in 1869. It was sold in 1884 but a sign still stands at the edge of the property on Warwick Turnpike. During the Civil War, he donated many of his paintings to raise money for the Union Army to provide medical services to injured soldiers. Cropsey died in 1900 in relative obscurity and poverty.
Cropsey painted a handful of landscapes in West Milford and the surrounding area. Water was clearly one of his favorite subjects. Among the most stunning of his works is Lake Wawayanda, 1876. A deeply hazy sun sets on the lake, which is surrounded by the brilliant hues of red and gold of autumn leaves. He also created several views of Greenwood Lake throughout his long affiliation with the area.
I recently treated myself by ordering a digital reproduction of Bareford Mountains; it now hangs over my desk. I like to stare at it and consider exactly where Cropsey was when he painted it. A flowing brook in the foreground could be Cooley’s Brook, which probably ran through his wife’s family’s farm.
My mind wanders back to 1850 and I wonder what things were like around here in those days. It’s astonishing how much human life has changed in a century and a half. In the meantime, Bearfort Mountain has remained pretty much the same, except perhaps for the way it is spelled.
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