Torre dei Schiavi, The Roman Campagna (from Cropsey Album)

Torre dei Schiavi, The Roman Campagna (from Cropsey Album)

Jasper Francis Cropsey

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

During his first European sojourn in 1847, the young Hudson River School-painter Cropsey toured and sketched in the Roman Campagna. The picturesque landscape around Rome was admired for its vast beauty and historic ruins—evidence of the greatness and decline of ancient civilizations. The Torre dei Schiavi (Tower of Slaves), a mausoleum built as part of an extensive imperial villa in the third century a.d., is one of the best-known monuments on the Campagna. As both a tomb and a ruin embodying Rome’s faded glory, the tower had poetic associations, which Cropsey emphasizes by including the rising moon, a potent symbol of eternal time. Cropsey was one of several American artists who drew the tower, including Thomas Cole (1801–1848) and William Stanley Haseltine (1835–1900).

The American Wing

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Torre dei Schiavi, The Roman Campagna (from Cropsey Album)Torre dei Schiavi, The Roman Campagna (from Cropsey Album)Torre dei Schiavi, The Roman Campagna (from Cropsey Album)Torre dei Schiavi, The Roman Campagna (from Cropsey Album)Torre dei Schiavi, The Roman Campagna (from Cropsey Album)

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.