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Oil on Canvas Warwick woodlands is an area of Orange County, New Jersey, with which Cropsey was intimately familiar and which he painted often. He bought forty-five acres in Warwick in 1866 and spent summers there between 1869 and 1884. From his house he had a view of the Warwick Valley to the west and the distant Catskills to the north, perhaps the valley and mountains seen in this painting. The landscape is warmed by the autumn tints for which Cropsey was famous. He began painting fall landscapes as early as 1845, possibly under the influence of nineteenth-century poetry and prose as well as the paintings of Thomas Cole. This season became a favorite subject of Cropsey in the 1850s, and he returned to it frequently after his Autumn on the Hudson River and other similar works were acclaimed by London critics in the early 1860s. The basic compositional pattern of that famous painting is reused, with variations, in Warwick Woodlands. In both, a distant view with water, mountains, and a spectacular sunset is framed by rocks and boulders in the foreground. Crospey overcame the problem of rendering bright colors while still giving an effect of recession by using lively brushwork for these closely viewed features. The cool colors and atmospheric perspective of the distant mountains also help to achieve the desired depth. The horizon recedes like a dream, fading away like the American wilderness that retreats from the encroachment of civilization (implied by the rickety bridge and minuscule figures in the front plane). When Cropsey painted Warwick Woodlands, he had recently triumphed at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial. From this time on, he made autumn subjects more than ever his stock-in-trade. Warwick Woodlands is typical of Cropsey's landscape paintings in several ways. He selects a low, close viewpoint, rather than the bird's-eye views preferred by Cole and Church, and thus draws the viewer immediately into his broad, deep panoramas. The vigorous brushwork of the foreground skillfully implies rough rocks, sparkling water, and leaves. As usual, his trees are not generalized types but are based on studies of specific species of nature.
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