Niagara Falls with View of Clifton House, 1852

Provenance

M. Alfred Newhouse, St. Louis, Missouri

Capt. and Mrs. John Wickliffe Kitchell, Pana, Illinois, 1897

MacMurry College collection, Jacksonville, Illinois, 1931

[With] Vose Galleries, Boston, Massachusetts, by 2000

[With] Hirschl & Adler Galleries, New York, New York, 2001

Babcock Galleries, New York, New York, by 2007

Private collection, New York, 2007

Private collection, New York

Sale, Doyle, New York, New York, November 3, 2022, lot 1064, from above

Literature

Tracie Felker, “American Falls, Niagara,” in Kevin J. Avery, American Drawings and Watercolors in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, vol. 1: A Catalogue of Works by Artists Born before 1835 (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2002), 230n8, 230n14.

“International Fine Art Fair,” Antiques and The Arts Weekly (June 8, 2007): 61–62.

Anthony M. Speiser, ed., Jasper Francis Cropsey: Catalogue Raisonné, Works in Oil, vol I: 1842–1863 (Hastings-on-Hudson, NY: Newington-Cropsey Foundation, 2013), 143–145, no. 236.

Related Works

Niagara Falls, 1853, oil on canvas, 48 x 72 inches, signed and dated lower right; Newington-Cropsey Foundation, Hastings-on-Hudson, New York

Niagara Falls from the Foot of Goat Island, 1857, oil on canvas, 15⅜ x 24⅛ inches; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts

Note: Jasper Francis Cropsey first visited Niagara Falls in 1852. He stayed at the Cataract House near the American falls and his time there is documented through several letters. In one such letter, dated November 1, 1897, Cropsey writes to the wealthy collector, John Wickliffe Kitchell, recounting:

In 1852 I visited Niagara Falls for the first time. Mr. Peter Porter, who was a large real estate owner at the Falls, and I think especially the owner of Goat Island and this part of the Falls, called my attention to a rock, that had fallen and lay partly submerged at the base of the American Fall—and the magnificent view to be obtained from it; of this part of the American Falls on the American Side. I immediately took advantage of his suggestions, and began my sketches. I think it was the first time this view was ever painted._[1]

Kitchell would buy Cropsey’s Niagara Falls with View of Clifton House that same year.

_[1] Anthony M. Speiser, ed., Jasper Francis Cropsey: Catalogue Raisonné, Works in Oil, vol I: 1842–1863 (Hastings-on-Hudson, NY: Newington-Cropsey Foundation, 2013), 144.