Stonehenge
Framed: 34 3/8 × 64 1/4 × 2 1/8 inches (87.33 × 163.2 × 5.41 cm)
- 216
Kaleidoscope of American Painting: Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, Kansas City, Mo., December 2, 1977–January 22, 1978, no. 45.
Cropsey employed a technique called pouncing so that he could use drawings as guides for a painting. Tiny holes are pricked into the paper along the drawn lines and then the paper is placed over the canvas. The pricked drawing is rubbed with charcoal, leaving transferred dotted lines on the surface below. The remnants of Cropsey's method are only visible under infrared light.
Felix Hinsberg, Passaic, N.J., 1877;
to (Anderson Galleries, New York, December 16–17, 1912, lot 293);
William B. Beam, Hackensack, N.J., by 1914;
(Victor D. Spark, New York, by 1977);
to Mila H. Baker, Kansas City, Mo., and Karen Dean Bunting, Shawnee Mission, Kans., 1977;
to NAMA, 1981.
“Fine Arts,” Commercial Advertiser (New York), January 30, 1877, 1 (as Stone Henge, Salisbury Plains, England).
“Art and Artists,” Home Journal, February 14, 1877, clipping, NAMA curatorial files.
“Local Items,” Jewish Messenger (New York), June 22, 1877, 2.
Anderson Galleries, New York, 16–17 December 1912, lot 293 (as Stonehenge, England).
William S. Talbot, Jasper F. Cropsey, 1823–1900 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1977), 207–8, 461 (as Stonehenge, Salisbury Plains).
Kaleidoscope of American Painting: Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. exh. cat. (Kansas City, Mo.: William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, 1977), 40.
An Unprejudiced Eye: The Drawings of Jasper F. Cropsey, exh. cat. (Yonkers, N.Y.: Hudson River Museum, 1979), 35.
Ross E. Taggart, “American Paintings in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri,” Antiques 122 (November 1982), 1038.
Gertrude Grace Sill, “Americans Abroad,” Portfolio: The Magazine of Fine Arts 5 (March–April 1983), 72–73.
Henry Adams, Handbook of American Paintings in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (Kansas City, Mo.: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1991), 92.
Peter J. Casagrande, Tess of the d’Urbervilles: Unorthodox Beauty (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992), cover.
Roger Ward and Patricia J. Fidler, eds. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: A Handbook of the Collections. 6th ed. (New York: Hudson Hills Press, in association with Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1993), 228, 236.
Margaret C. Conrads, ed. The Collections of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: American Paintings to 1945 (Kansas City, Mo.: The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2007), 1: 205–209, 2: 96–97.
Deborah Emont Scott, ed., The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: A Handbook of the Collection, 7th ed. (Kansas City, MO: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2008), 166.