Greenwood Lake

As well as being a painter, Cropsey worked as an architect throughout his life. Painting was nevertheless his more important profession and the one to which he devoted most time. His work, as we can see in this example, is very close in style to that of Cole, and he is in fact considered the most important representative of the second generation of painters of the Hudson River School.

Lake Greenwood was one of the most frequently recurring motifs in Cropsey’s work. According to the artist himself, it was here that he first started to paint, inspired by the magnificence of its landscape, and his paintings transmit this sense of the splendour of nature in its virgin state.