Sleepers Awake

Europe's impressionists and old masters have been claiming high prices for years, but the most recent success story in the art market deals with a contingent of sleepers who, like Rip Van Winkle, are returning to public esteem after a century of obscurity. American 19th century painting, from the works of such frontier reporters as George Caleb Bingham, whose pictures today bring as high as $250,000, to the early 20th century cityscapes of the Ashcan School, is enjoying a remarkable revival. A Hudson River landscape by Frederick Church that sold for $3,500 in the 1950s went last year for $40,000; a canvas by Thomas Eakins or Winslow Homer can bring $200,000.

Along with the awakened market has come a widening interest among American scholars in rediscovering their national esthetic heritage, including fresh appreciation of even the minor figures. A case in point is Jasper Francis Cropsey, a Hudson River landscapist (1823-1900), who last week was honored with an exhibition of 36 oils at the University of Maryland Art Gallery, organized by Museum Fellow Peter Bermingham. A decade ago, Cropsey's landscapes sold for between $200 and $2,000; today they bring between $3,000 and $15,000.

Cropsey, a Dutch Reformed elder of Dutch-French parentage and a staunch romantic idealizer of nature, was born on Staten Island and trained as an architect in New York City. He was not an artist of wide-ranging scope, but he excelled at one uniquely American subject: the blazing radiance of Yankee countryside in autumn. Cropsey's magnum opus, Autumn on the Hudson River, now in the National Gallery, was completed in 1860, while the artist was living in London, and commemorated a view near West Point overlooking Storm King Mountain. The panorama includes hunters, grazing sheep, and sailboats, but its real subject is the vivid plumage of birch, sugar maple, hemlock and scarlet oak. A century later, Cropsey's portrayal is still fresh and unspoiled, a continuing celebration of the season when, as Thoreau said, "every tree is a living liberty pole, on which a thousand bright flags are flying."

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