Geoff Welch helped determine that an 1846 painting labeled "Janetta Falls, Passaic County" was really Clinton Falls.
Posted on 12/08/2008 10:59:03 PM PST by Coleus
For decades, North Jersey historians, art experts and naturalists had been stumped.
Where was Janetta Falls, Passaic County? Was there a Janetta Falls in Passaic County? Art experts wanted to know because Jasper F. Cropsey, a celebrated Hudson River School artist, painted several waterfall scenes in 1846 and identified them as Janetta Falls. "It's been a mystery for decades," said Kenneth W. Maddox, art historian at the Newington-Cropsey Foundation, in Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y. Finally, thanks in part to an old magazine article, a local historian and naturalist has determined that Janetta Falls is really Clinton Falls, located in West Milford just south of the Clinton Reservoir.
Why Cropsey called it "Janetta Falls" remains a mystery. Cropsey used his paints to depict the natural beauty of Passaic County and the Highlands in the mid-1800s. He produced scenes of the Ramapo Valley, Lake Wawayanda and Greenwood Lake. His wife grew up in West Milford, and he kept a studio there. The smaller of the two "Janetta Falls" is nearly 2 feet high and now hangs in the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. The larger rendering, more than 5 feet tall, is at the Baltimore Museum of Art. The mystery of Janetta Falls was merely one of many about Cropsey's art — he made 2,500 paintings — that Maddox has stumbled across as he compiles a listing of Cropsey's works. "Cropsey's titles are very accurate — or completely erroneous," Maddox said. Cropsey often took liberties, distorting or rearranging the natural landscape in some paintings, he said.
"Sometimes artists liked to jazz up their titles. And sometimes titles become garbled as they pass from owner to owner," Maddox said. Dealers have been known to deliberately change a title, Maddox said, to inflate a work's value. A painting of the Susquehanna, for instance, might draw higher bids if the title said it was of the Hudson. Cropsey painted Torne Mountain in the Ramapo Valley numerous times, but he always spelled it "Tourn." "Washington's Headquarters on the Hudson," an 1851 Cropsey owned by the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., is actually another view of Torne Mountain. George Washington is said to have spied on the British Navy's ship movements off Sandy Hook from the top of the mountain. "I've ended up changing I don't know how many titles," Maddox said. To solve the Janetta Falls mystery, Maddox turned to an old friend, Geoff Welch, who is Ramapo River Watershed Keeper and curator of Harmony Hall in Sloatsburg, N.Y.
Welch has a real appreciation for Cropsey's work. "He had a good poetic quality and as a daring colorist became famous for his autumn scenes," Welch said. Perhaps Cropsey's best-known work is his 1860 "Autumn — on the Hudson River" at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. When Cropsey first displayed the piece in London, British viewers expressed skepticism that the vibrant leaf colors were authentic. Cropsey sent for some autumn leaves from home and tacked them on the wall to prove his colors were not exaggerated. Given how many Hudson River School artists painted the Highlands, Welch wants to develop a "Highlands Art Trail." He envisions people driving to each scene depicted in a painting, where information on the works would be available. Welch figured the "Janetta Falls" picture would be part of that trail — if he could find the falls.
Welch took a photocopy of the painting and talked to some locals about it. Several thought it had to be near Greenwood Lake. In an 1847 letter home from England, Cropsey's wife, Maria, described a famous falls that she had visited as "not half so pretty and picturesque as Janetta falls at the Greenwood." Welch struck pay dirt when he checked the archives of Harper's New Monthly Magazine, which covered the American art scene during the mid-1800s. The April 1860 edition had a story called "Artist-life in the Highlands." It depicts a tired artist and his brother who sat on the roof of a stage coach during "a long and tedious ride of five hours" from Paterson to West Milford. They wanted to stretch their legs, and their tavern host suggested that "at Clinton, about a mile up the road, there was a fall ... said to be very pretty." The brothers found the falls and the artist realized the scene resembled "one of those cabinet pictures which have made the name of Cropsey so ... famous."
"That's it!" thought Welch as he read the story. A "cabinet picture" was small enough to display in a home, compared to a large canvas for a museum — so it must be a reference to the smaller "Janetta Falls" painting. Contemporary artists would have been familiar with it because it had been displayed in 1858 at the National Academy of Design in New York. "Janetta Falls" most likely is West Milford's Clinton Falls, a spot along Clinton Brook, just south of the dam for the Clinton Reservoir. The reservoir is part of Newark's drinking water supply. The Clinton Falls are eight miles from where Cropsey's Greenwood Lake studio had been. But now that the falls have been found, one mystery remains: Why did Cropsey call Clinton Falls "Janetta Falls"? "I never heard that one before myself," said Jim Van Hooker, chairman of the West Milford Historical Commission. "That's a new one on me."
Call me a dork, but I always find stories like this terribly interesting.
cool! i’m sending this to my artist friends! :) they’ll love it too. thanks for sharing BattleHymn!
A very quick search tells me “Janetta” was perhaps a common name back then.
“....James Voorhees was placed on the pension rolls as a Sargeant in the US Infantry on 17. Sep. ...... Janetta Voorhees was born in 1856 at New Jersey. ...”
Voorhees was someone important (Voorhees High School, etc.). Perhaps the falls was named by the painter in honor of someone important.
Although I would like to think that perhaps the artist on a romantic walk in the woods with a young lass promised to name the falls in the painting after her if....
I grew up in the Ramapo River Valley in Oakland, NJ and Monroe NY. As an adult I lived in New Windsor, NY and could see the Hudson Highlands out my living room window. A truly lovely area now destroyed politically by RINOs and Democrats.
oops sorry Coleus! i should have been thanking YOU. :\ Seasonal Stress...lol
Oh come on, that painting looks like countless other locations out in the woods all across the country. Apparently people don’t get out much in nature.
Looks just like an area on my granpa’s property in Texas when he was alive.
Yep, looks like a number of places I’ve seen in the Hoosier National Forest.
Whew! I was worried they would never figure that out. :-)
But in this instance the painting is nearly EXACTLY the same as the photo.
fwiw-
Exactly? Hell, they’re not even CLOSE! I could find a hundred such locations in N. Jersey alone! Ridiculous
Nope. A subset of the course of linguistics that specialises in saying, “Would you like fries with that?”
OK!
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Thanks kitchen. I'll have to ask Art -- there are certain things about his past he probably doesn't want known. |
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Aren’t those areas around Hyde Park, the Vanderbilt house and West Point beautiful?
We’ve had quite a few lovely picnics in the parks along the great Hudson.
Ed
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