American Harvesting
Engraver James Smillie American
After Jasper Francis Cropsey American
Publisher American Art-Union, New York American
Not on view
Within a mountainous landscape, a woman and children approach a fence next to field where harvesters work. The engraving reproduces a painting by Cropsey (1851; Ezkenazi Museum of Art, Indiana Univeristy) and was published by the American Art-Union, a New York institution that boasted nearly nineteen thousand subscribers at its height in 1849–50. For an annual fee of five dollars, each subscriber-member received a fine, large engraving and was entered in a lottery to win original artworks shown at the Art-Union's Free Gallery. The organization aimed to educate the public about contemporary American art and established a distribution network that reached every state, contributing to the creation of a national market for landscapes, genre paintings and small bronze sculptures. The system flourished for a limited period, however, with no lottery taking place in 1851, the year that this print was announced as part of a set of small engravings titled "Gallery of American Art, No. II." It was not published until 1853, the year that the Art-Union was forced to dissolve.
