Tourn Mountain, Head Quarters of Washington, Rockland Co., New York

Jasper Francis Cropsey

National Gallery of Art

A river winds from close to us to a distant mountain outlined against a dim sky in this horizontal landscape painting, which has a shallowly arched top. The rippling river bends from the bottom right corner of the canvas into the middle of the painting and then curves out of view in a grassy field. Wisps of fog to the right show the distant path of the river. Land in the lower left corner of the painting is loosely painted with earthy green and brown, which could represent grass, rocks, and fallen tree trunks. Sunlight warms a single-story, compact, white-walled house with a brown roof and a chimney in a clearing to the left. A few trees stand near the house, and a tree-carpeted mountain rises sharply beyond it. The mountain is backlit or thrown into shadow by the low sun. In the top quarter of the composition, pale peach-colored clouds kick up around the mountain against a pink-tinged horizon in the blue sky. The artist signed and dated the painting as if he had written on a rock in the lower center of the composition, “1851 J.F. Cropsey.”