"The art of Jasper Cropsey serves not only as a reminder of artistic excellence, but as a touchstone for those values of transcendence, virtue, beauty, and civitas that once were commonly shared by most Americans."
Jasper Cropsey's 1860 painting Autumn -- On the Hudson River is "the quintessential painting of the Hudson River School," declares art scholar James Cooper. "Painted in England on the eve of the American Civil War, Autumn constitutes a visual sermon in two parts. The first part is about Nature manifested through God blessing the American enterprise. The second part is about the imminent loss of this 'second Garden of Eden.'"
Writing in the Winter issue of the American Arts Quarterly, published by the Newington-Cropsey Foundation, Cooper describes how Jasper Cropsey's painting "reveals a national landscape with telescopic, surreal intensity. In the foreground of this large painting," he observes, "are two small reclining figures communing with nature beneath a cluster of trees in a wooded clearing. . . . Before their gaze the American landscape spreads out toward a vast horizon that encompasses towns and ships sailing on the Hudson. Beyond, the mountains rise up to brush the clouds and, still further, across the great river, shrouded in low cumulus clouds, rises the breadth of a continent. All are touched by shafts of transcendent light that breaks through a dark cloud like the eye of God. . . .
"The sun in Autumn is positioned just above the precise center of the painting, behind a thick bank of dark ominous clouds that cover a considerable portion of the greyish sky. A small plume of white phosphorescent fire bursts upward through a crack between two of these dark clouds. Beneath and behind the clouds, shafts of light . . . stretch down and touch portions of the vast landscape panorama below. . . . Trees touched by shafts of celestial light emanating from this tiny molten core are colored in brilliant bursts of autumnal reds, golds, and oranges that resemble flames more than leaves." Noting that the painting is "clearly illuminated by a supernatural light as much as a natural one," Cooper emphasizes that "the light is uncharacteristically dimmed in what appears to be a moral comment on the future of the nation."
The work of Cropsey and his compatriots in the Hudson River School has "particular relevance today for Americans whose thinking is shaped by a post-modern culture that rejects spirituality, beauty, and virtue," says Cooper. "The spiritual vacuum at the core of contemporary American culture suggests the urgent need for renewal, yet for much of the twentieth century the arts have been separated from the spiritual, the moral, and the aesthetic," he laments. "For Americans caught up in the nihilism and irony of postmodern culture, Autumn suggests that spirituality, beauty, and virtue are not dead but asleep. They await a time when civilization, having exhausted itself in pursuit of the failed ideologies that have wreaked havoc on much of the twentieth century, will once again open up itself to those timeless spiritual values from which renewal springs."
