(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 :. | Autumn in America | Bareford Mountains | Greenwood Lake | Indian Summer | Sunset Eagle Cliff |
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Ferdinand von Rayski
1806-1890 was a German painter noted for his portraits. Rayski was born in 1806 in Pegau. From 1816 to 1821 he studied drawing under Traugott Faber at the Freimaurerinstitut in Dresden and from 1823 to 1825 studied at Kunstakademie in Dusseldorf. He began his career as a professional artist in 1829, painting portraits of his noble relatives in Hannover and Silesia. From 1831 to 1834 he lived in Dresden, where he received numerous portrait commissions. He traveled to Paris in 1834-35, and was influenced by the works of Delacroix, Gericault and Gros. Rayski gained a reputation as a distinguished portrait painter, but also produced animal and hunting scenes, as well as, yet less frequently, military, historical and mythological paintings.