This fall, art lovers have a rare opportunity to witness history unfold at the Brandywine Museum of Art. On view now through May 31, 2026, the museum presents the world debut of Autumn in the Ramapo Valley, Erie Railway of 1873 a monumental landscape painting by Jasper Francis Cropsey (1823–1900) that hasn’t been seen on American soil in more than 150 years.
Once hidden away in British private collections since 1873, the seven-foot-wide painting has finally returned home thanks to the J. Jeffrey and Ann Marie Fox Foundation for American Art, which recently acquired the work. Its arrival inspired the Brandywine’s new exhibition, Cropsey, Wyeth, and the American Landscape Tradition, a sweeping look at how generations of American artists, from the Hudson River School to the Wyeths, captured the majesty and meaning of the American landscape.
Commissioned in the 1870s by Irish-born businessman James McHenry to celebrate his investment in the Erie Railroad, Autumn in the Ramapo Valley bridges the worlds of art, nature, and industry. Cropsey’s luminous fall scene—with its sweeping valley and winding railway—honors the beauty of the land and the bold engineering that transformed it.
At the Brandywine, Autumn in the Ramapo Valley, Erie Railway anchors the exhibition that traces the evolution of American landscape painting—from the grandeur of the Hudson River School to the emotional realism of N.C. and Andrew Wyeth. Visitors will find works by Albert Bierstadt, William Trost Richards, Mary Blood Mellen, and Martin Johnson Heade, alongside rarely seen Wyeth paintings that reveal how deeply Andrew Wyeth studied his predecessors.
Through these works, the exhibition Cropsey, Wyeth, and the American Landscape Tradition reveals how artists across centuries found inspiration in the same sweeping valleys, golden fields, and quiet rivers that define our region today.
After its global debut in Chadds Ford, the painting will embark on a national tour through 2028, traveling to major museums including the Dixon Gallery & Gardens (Memphis, TN), Speed Art Museum (Louisville, KY), and the Georgia Museum of Art (Athens, GA) before concluding at the Newington-Cropsey Foundation in New York.
