(February 18, 1823 - April 23, 1900) was an important American landscape artist of the Hudson River School. Cropsey was born on his father Jacob Rezeau Cropsey's farm in Rossville on Staten Island, New York, the oldest of eight children. As a young boy, Cropsey had recurring periods of poor health. While absent from school, Cropsey taught himself to draw. His early drawings included architectural sketches and landscapes drawn on notepads and in the margins of his schoolbooks. Trained as an architect, he set up his own office in 1843. Cropsey studied watercolor and life drawing at the National Academy of Design under the instruction of Edward Maury and first exhibited there in 1844. A year later he was elected an associate member and turned exclusively to landscape painting; shortly after he was featured in an exhibition entitled "Italian Compositions." Cropsey married Maria Cooley in May 1847, traveled in Europe from 1847-1849, visiting England, France, Switzerland, and Italy. He was elected a full member of the Academy in 1851. Cropsey was a personal friend of Henry Tappan, the president of the University of Michigan from 1852 to 1863. At Tappan's invitation, he traveled to Ann Arbor in 1855 and produced two paintings, one of the Detroit Observatory, and a landscape of the campus. He went abroad again in 1855, and resided seven years in London, sending his pictures to the Royal Academy and to the International exhibition of 1862. Returning home, he opened a studio in New York and specialized in autumnal landscape paintings of the northeastern United States, often idealized and with vivid colors. Cropsey co-founded, with ten fellow artists, the American Society of Painters in Water Colors in 1866. He resided in the City until 1885, when he removed to Hastings-on-Hudson. The monument of Jasper Francis Cropsey in Sleepy Hollow CemeteryCropsey's home and studio, Ever Rest, in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York as well as the largest permanent collection of Cropsey's work are open for tours by the Newington-Cropsey Foundation. Jasper Cropsey died in anonymity but was rediscovered by galleries and collectors in the 1960s. Today, Cropsey's paintings are found in most major American museums, including the National Gallery of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Timken Museum of Art in San Diego, the Honolulu Academy of Arts, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Denver Art Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Works by Cropsey also hang in the White House.  Related Paintings of Jasper Francis Cropsey :. | Green Mountain Scenery, | Sunset Eagle Cliff | Autumn at Mount Chocorua | A Bend in the River | View of Capri |
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Briton Riviere
(14 August 1840 C 1920) was an Irish artist born in London, England. His father, William Riviere, was for some years drawing-master at Cheltenham College, and afterwards an art teacher at Oxford University. He was educated at Cheltenham College and at Oxford, where he took his degree in 1867. For his art training he was indebted almost entirely to his father, and early in life made for himself a place of importance among the artists of his time. His first pictures appeared at the British Institution, and in 1857 he exhibited three works at the Royal Academy, but it was not until 1863 that he became a regular contributor to the Academy exhibitions. In that year he was represented by "The Eve of the Spanish Armada", and in 1864 by a "Romeo and Juliet". Subjects of this kind did not, however, attract him long, for in 1865 he began, with a picture of a "Sleeping Deer-hound", a series of paintings of animal-subjects which later occupied him almost exclusively.
Edouard Castres
Swiss 1838 - 1902 Swiss painter. His father was a clock engraver, and he initially trained as an enamellist. He took drawing lessons from Barthelemy Menn and attended the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1859. He soon decided to concentrate on oil painting. He was assistant to the genre and figure painter Eduardo Zamacois y Zabala (1842-71). In the Franco-Prussian War he joined the Red Cross, moving into Switzerland at the beginning of February 1871 with the army led by Gen. Bourbaki. He painted military scenes from sketches carried out on the battlefield and received consistently good reviews, which also brought financial success. He was commissioned by a Belgian panorama company to record the entry of the French army into Switzerland, which he had witnessed in 1871. He spent the winter of 1876-7 on site at Les Verrieres, painting preparatory studies, and in 1881 he completed the panorama, Gen. Bourbaki's Army Retreating into Switzerland (Lucerne, Panorama). He was aided by nine assistants, recruited from among Menn's pupils, who included Ferdinand Hodler. The work was exhibited in Geneva and was brought to a rotunda in Lucerne in 1889. Among panorama paintings it is a work of a high order: despite the colossal dimensions and the barely comprehensible mass of people depicted, the dominant impression is of individual suffering.
Gillis Mostraert
Hulst 1534-Antwerp after 1598