Note: This painting will be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the artist's work in preparation by the Newington Cropsey Foundation.

Hailed as one of the key figures in the Luminist tradition of American landscape painting, Jasper Cropsey is a painter for all seasons. He is renowned for his vibrant autumnal landscapes, bringing these richly colored scenes of wilderness to a national and international audience. He painted extensively in the Hudson River Valley, his paintings garnering high praise even at the earliest stages of his career. As a critic of the National Academy of Designs exhibition of 1847 commented in Lieteray World (New York) May 8, 1847,

"Mr. Cropsey is one of the few among our landscape painters who go directly to Nature from their materials(…) and it is no disparagement to the abilities of those veterans of landscape art, Cole and Durand, to prophesy that before many years have elapsed, he will stand with them in the front rank, shoulder to shoulder."

Cropsey painted at least nine series of the four seasons, representing spring in Italy, summer in England, autumn in America, and winter in Switzerland. In Europe, the turning of the seasons was a long-established allegorical motif evoking the progress of time and issues of mortality and transience, and he used this to infuse the landscape with deeper significance.

Winter depicts the Simplon Pass linking Switzerland with Italy. Long a strategic passage dating to Napoleanic times, its grandeur was celebrated by William Wordsworth, who wrote a poem entitled "The Simplon Pass" which describes, "giddy prospect of the raving stream,/ The unfettered clouds and region of the heavens." Cropsey depicts the pass as a glacial landscape of knifelike peaks and a deep valley. Combining the grandeur of landscape and the intimacy of genre painting, he places two hooded monks with a dog in between these two elements, caught in the golden rays of the setting sun as they radiate over the frozen, snow covered landscape. Cropsey found the divine in nature, and in the present work, man is balanced between the snowy vertiginous peaks reaching toward the heavens and the dark abyss, warmed by fading sunlight.

While many artists chose not to depict winter, fearing that the desolation would be too challenging for their viewers and preferring the liveliness of spring, summer and autumn, Cropsey creates a landscape infused with moral meaning, a meaning reinforced by its place in the cycle of nature.

Cropsey enjoyed an illustrious career as one of the leading proponents of the Hudson River School. He exhibited extensively at the National Academy of Design where he was elected full Academician in 1851. He also exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; Brooklyn Art Association, Brooklyn, NY; Royal Academy of London, Boston Athenaeum, Boston Art Club, and the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876. His work is housed in The White House, Washington, DC; Hermitage Museum, Russia; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY; The Newark Museum, Newark, NJ; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, ME; Mead Art Museum, Amherst, MA; Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, OH; Peabody Institute, Baltimore, MD; and many other notable institutions.