Catskill Mountain House

The Catskill Mountain House was a resort hotel built on South Mountain (elevation 2,200 feet) in rural New York State to accommodate a continuous stream of artists and tourists who began to frequent the location for its sweeping views of nature in its most rugged state. Jasper Cropsey first sketched the house in 1852 and made this painting, the final version of the scene, in 1855 for James Edgar, a businessman from Chicago.

Cropsey belonged to the second generation of Hudson River School artists, a mid-nineteenth-century group of American landscape painters working in the Hudson River valley and the Catskill and Adirondack Mountains. Their depictions of the New World underscored the vastness of America, as well as the immensity of its then untapped natural resources.