Case 14 2012/13: a painting by Jasper Cropsey, Richmond Hill in the Summer of 1862

Expert adviser’s statement

Reviewing Committee Secretary’s note: Please note that any illustrations referred to have not been reproduced on the Arts Council England Website

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

1 Brief Description of Item

Jasper Francis Cropsey (1823-1900)

Richmond Hill in the Summer of 1862

Oil on canvas, 137 x 244 cm

Signed and dated 1862

The painting was studied by National Gallery curators in Autumn 1999 and Spring 2012 and was ascertained to be in good condition.

2 Context

Provenance

Foster & Sons, London, Pictures and Sketches by J.F. Cropsey Esq, 29 April 1863, lot 125; Mr. Graham, purchased at the above sale for £472; James McHenry Esq, by 1870; Bonhams, London, 14 December 1999, lot 50; Private collection, London, purchased at the above sale

Literature

The Art Journal, 1863, p. 102; The Illustrated London News, 25 April, 1863, p. 463; The Times, 1863 (reprinted in H.T. Tuckerman, Book of the Artist, American Artist Life, New York, 1870, pp. 533, 537-38; C. Erskine, C. Waters and L. Hutton, Artists of the Nineteenth Century and their Works, London, 1879, pp. 173-4; W. Talbot, Jasper Francis Cropsey, New York, 1977, cat. 137, pp. 161-2, 165-7, 423-4, 510

Exhibited

Henry Graves Gallery, No. 6 Pall Mall, London, J.F. Cropsey Collection, 1863 (prior to auction above)

3 Waverley criteria

The painting meets Waverley criterion 2 owing to its high aesthetic value as a rare large-scale landscape of an English scene by a leading American painter. It was executed at a pivotal moment in Cropsey’s career when he was living in Britain during the American Civil War. It has not left Britain in the 150 years since it was painted.

The painting meets Waverley criterion 3 as an important document on these shores of the central role Britain continued to play in American art throughout the nineteenth century. Many American artists, particularly landscape painters like Cropsey, visited Britain to study. The works of Turner in particular were a touchstone as they sought ways to deal pictorially with the vastness and grandeur of the American frontier. For Cropsey, Frederic Church (1823-1900) and their contemporaries it was also vitally important to exhibit major paintings here, and to find critical acclaim and patrons in Britain. The approval of London significantly influenced success at home. Because of this, a surprising number of important American landscape paintings were shown here and subsequently entered British collections in the nineteenth century. Few remain today. Church’s Icebergs of 1861 (Dallas Museum of Art) which left Britain as recently as 1979, its export unopposed, arguably is the greatest loss. This painting, known in the literature from the time of its first exhibition but rediscovered only in 1999, is a rare survivor.

DETAILED CASE

Born on Staten Island, New York, and trained as an architect, Cropsey showed precocious artistic talent. Drawn to landscape painting, which had emerged in the early nineteenth century as the most innovative branch of American painting, he first showed at New York’s National Academy in 1843, was elected an associate a year later, and became a full member in 1851. A two-year honeymoon to Europe beginning in 1847 exposed him to Britain and the Continent, and the increasing ambition of the works he undertook back in America registered the impact. He returned to England in 1856, befriended Ruskin, Eastlake and other leading figures of the art world, and showed regularly at the Royal Academy. Autumn on the Hudson River (Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art), a celebration of the untrammelled glories of the American landscape, was particularly well-received when Cropsey showed it in London in 1860 and again in 1862.

If, as Andrew Wilton has argued, Autumn on the Hudson River was influenced by a Turner painting of Richmond Hill then on view in London (The American Sublime, 2002, p. 137), soon after completing that work – which at least one critic did indeed compare to Turner -- Cropsey determined to paint Richmond Hill itself on an even more monumental scale. Indeed, the two paintings can be considered companion pieces contrasting English and American landscapes, one tamed by the hand of man, the other still wild. By extension, they contrast two intimately related but increasingly divergent cultures, with both of which the artist felt strong affinities. Where the Hudson is bathed in flame-like autumnal colours, Richmond is seen in the haze of summer sunlight. The eye sweeps down the hill where sight seers have gathered, across green lawns and greener stands of trees, past Ham House and along the meandering river, to a miniscule Windsor Castle on the horizon. The sky is golden and this luminous glow is reflected in the water too. One early critic of the painting said it depicted “a view unsurpassed for its purely English beauty” (The Illustrated London News, 25 April 1863, p. 463), and an attempt to arrive at something quintessentially British surely lay at the heart of Cropsey’s ambition. Moreover, he had been presented to the Queen the year before, no small honour for a foreign artist, and the glimpse he gives us of Windsor cannot be accidental; he appeals here to deep strains of English nostalgia, love of nature, and pride.

The foreground is full of lively, almost Frith-like incident including, just to the left of centre, an artist at his easel – Cropsey himself? – painting this very landscape. (One oil sketch survives (MacMurray College, Jackson, IL) while a watercolour replica (Newington-Cropsey Foundation, Hastings-on-Hudson, NY) was intended as the model for an engraving, never executed.) People of various classes, including soldiers and children, enjoy the park and the fine weather. Boys with donkeys for hire idle by. It has been suggested that two figures in grey uniforms may be (American) Confederate soldiers, a reference to the conflict then engulfing the United States which Cropsey could not ignore. Still, it was the pure Englishness of the scene that captivated its first critics, as the artist surely intended. One extolled Cropsey’s “clear appreciation of peculiarities in our English landscape. … It is interesting to see how a Transatlantic eye views us in these respects” (The Art Journal, 1863, p. 102). The Athenaeum, for its part, evoked Turner, who had painted the same view “indifferently well,” while declaring the up-start American’s painting to be “far beyond all former pictorial representations of the subject” (p. 464).

History would not necessarily agree to rank Cropsey above Turner. Nor indeed is he generally placed at the pinnacle of achievement among contemporary American landscapists. He tended to repetition and a reliance on pictorial formulae. His figures could be weak. His painting career waned in the later years. At his peak, however, in the 1850s and ‘60s, he was a formidable landscape painter, subtley responsive to nature and able to imbue panoramic vistas with a beautifully controlled sense of ambient atmosphere. He returned to America in 1863, having sold Richmond Hill and other works before he left in order to pay off debts. (Cropsey had lived well in London and entertained lavishly.) While he continued to paint until his death, later works lack the ambition and breadth of vision of the earlier ones, among which Richmond Hill in the Summer of 1862 enjoys a place apart. It is a unique example of a sensibility forged by the American sublime addressing the English pastoral.

Neil MacGregor, then Director of the National Gallery opposed the export of this painting when a licence was applied for once before, in February 2000. The Export Review Committee determined at the time that the painting met the second and third Waverley criteria and recommended that export be deferred for three months while a potential purchaser was identified at or above the recommended price of £1,566, 262.50. The owner then withdrew the licence application. (Department of Culture, Media and Sport: Export of Works of Art 1999-2000, case 17, pp.52-54.)

The Public Catalogue Foundation / BBC Your Paintings does not list any Cropsey paintings in British public collections. He is well-represented in the major American collections, including the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.