Jasper Francis Cropsey

Jasper Francis Cropsey 1823-1900, American artist, b. Staten Island, N.Y. Trained as an architect, Cropsey designed two churches in Staten Island and several stations on the Sixth Ave. elevated railway in Manhattan (1876). A member of the Hudson River school of painters, he was a founder of the American Water Color Society and is particularly noted for his autumn landscapes and Civil War scenes.

Hudson River School. Term applied retrospectively to a number of American landscape painters, active c.1825–c.1875, who were inspired by pride in the beauty of their homeland. This patriotic spirit won them great popularity in the middle years of the century. The early leaders and the three most important figures in the group were Thomas Cole, Thomas Doughty, and Asher B. Durand, who painted the Hudson River Valley, the Catskill Mountains, and other remote and untouched areas of natural beauty. These three artists and many of those who followed, including Jasper F. Cropsey (1823–1900) and John Frederick Kensett (1862–72), had studied in Europe and part of their inspiration came from painters of the grandiose and spectacular such as Turner and John Martin. Painters of a similar outlook who found their inspiration in the far West are known collectively as the Rocky Mountain School.

Print Renaissance or Print Revival. Terms sometimes used to describe an upsurge of interest in printmaking among American artists from the late 1950s. It was characterized by the opening of several workshops specializing in the creation of high quality artists' prints, the first of which (producing lithographs) was Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE) at West Islip on Long Island, New York, set up in 1957 by the Russian-born Mrs Tatyana Grosman (1904–82). Her friends Fritz Glarner and Larry Rivers were among the first to work there; they were followed by Jasper Johns (1960), Robert Rauschenberg (1962), and other well-known artists. In 1960 the most famous establishment of the Print Renaissance—the Tamarind Lithography Workshop—was established in Los Angeles (it is named after a street there) by June Wayne (1918– ), a painter, printmaker, designer, and writer. She had ‘received a grant from the Ford Foundation to set up a workshop where experienced lithography printers would work with students, already trained in an art school or university, in a master-and-apprentice system. The students would progress as they mastered successively more complex techniques until they became master lithographers, at which time they either succeeded the shop master, set up their own shops, or became teachers of lithography’ ( Riva Castleman, Prints of the 20th Century, revised edn., 1988). In addition, practising artists were given two-month fellowships to work there. The Workshop flourished in Los Angeles until 1970 and then was transferred to the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque as the Tamarind Institute. During its decade in Los Angeles, 104 artists held fellowships, including Sam Francis and Louise Nevelson. Among the successful Tamarind graduates was Kenneth Tyler (1931– ), who in 1966 was one of the founders of Gemini GEL (Graphics Editions Ltd.) in Los Angeles. In 1967 it produced Rauschenberg's six-feet-high Booster, the largest lithograph ever printed up to that date. It was not only lithography that figured in the Print Renaissance; screenprinting became popular in the early 1960s, and the Crown Point Press in Oakland, California, established by Kathan Brown in 1962, specialized in intaglio processes such as etching.