Jasper Francis Cropsey (1823 - 1900) Watercolor on Paper, Signed & Dated Lower Right " J. F. Cropsey 1898 " Cropsey trained as an architect under the tuition of Joseph Trench in the early 1840s, a period in which he was also trained in watercolor painting, instructed by Edward Maury, and took some life drawing courses at the National Academy of Design.[2] He set up his own architecture office in 1843, but began exhibiting his watercolors at the National Academy of Design in 1844. A year later he was elected an associate member and turned exclusively to landscape painting; shortly after he was featured in an exhibition entitled "Italian Compositions".Cropsy traveled in Europe from 1847 to 1849, visiting England, France, Switzerland, and Italy. He was elected a full member of the Academy in 1851. Cropsey was a personal friend of Henry Tappan, the president of the University of Michigan from 1852 to 1863. At Tappan's invitation, he traveled to Ann Arbor in 1855 and produced two paintings, one of the Detroit Observatory, and a landscape of the campus.[3] He went abroad again in 1856, and resided seven years in London, sending his pictures to the Royal Academy and to the International exhibition of 1862.Starrucca Viaduct, Pennsylvania (1865)Returning home, he opened a studio in New York and specialized in autumnal landscape paintings of the northeastern United States, often idealized and with vivid colors. Cropsey co-founded, with ten fellow artists, the American Society of Painters in Water Colors in 1866. He also made the architectural designs for the stations of the elevated railways in New York.

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