Pompton Plains, New Jersey

Jasper Francis Cropsey

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Cropsey had worked six years in England before returning to the United States in 1863, in the midst of the Civil War. At home his work in landscape shifted to spatial compositions such as "Battlefield at Gettysburg" (unlocated), "The Valley of Wyoming" (66.113), and "Pompton Plains, New Jersey". These pictures reflect not only the artist's patriotism but his renewed interest in the aesthetics of his contemporaries, such as Sanford Gifford, whose "Kauterskill Clove" (15.30.62) helped define the aerial luminism that marked much of the work of the second-generation Hudson River School. The providential overtone of the all-pervasive light falling on the landscape here is detectable in the focal detail of the church steeple near the horizon at center.

The American Wing

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The American Wing's ever-evolving collection comprises some 20,000 works of art by African American, Euro American, Latin American, and Native American men and women. Ranging from the colonial to early-modern periods, the holdings include painting, sculpture, works on paper, and decorative arts—including furniture, textiles, ceramics, glass, silver, metalwork, jewelry, basketry, quill and bead embroidery—as well as historical interiors and architectural fragments.

Metropolitan Museum of Art