Jasper F. Cropsey 's American Harvesting

Jasper F. Cropsey is one of the famous American landscape painters of the second generation of the Hudson River School during the 19th century. In his work American Harvesting (1851) that is now kept in the IU art museum, he presents the American landscape as an uncorrupted and prosperous Eden, where human beings live there effortlessly as masters of nature. The most recognizable stylistic feature in his work would be the balance of wilderness and civilization, which is accomplished through the use of light and color. He depicts the landscape in a massive scale, and also plays with large and small forms using proportion.
Based on traditional landscape painting methods, Cropsey made clear observation of different landscapes of nature and drew sketches of them. He then combined them to create a larger, composite landscape painting. Here, we can see that he presents a Romantic panoramic landscape view in his canvas and organized spatial recession in this landscape with the use of light and color. The painting can almost be divided into three main parts: a dark foreground, a bright middle ground and a translucent background. In the foreground, he depicts the wilderness in a dark tone. In the center, Cropsey uses a warm golden yellow to brighten the cultivated hay fields of the family farm. Not only it creates a contrast with the dark surrounding wilderness, but it also was a recognizable style of the artist’s time. With that said, we can tell that this painting has a relative clarity, and that Cropsey might intend to make a focus upon the things in the middle. To recede the viewer’s eyes to the background, Cropsey uses a lighter and cooler color to portray the objects, for example, the grayish-blue mountains and translucent clouds. It creates an illusion of three-dimensional space and furthers the distance away from the viewer. The brushwork of the painting is evidently loose, which gives a painterly effect. Therefore, we can say that Cropsey depicts the scenery by