Jasper Francis Cropsey (February 18, 1823 - June 22, 1900) was an American architect and artist. He is best known for his Hudson River School landscape paintings. Cropsey was born on his father Jacob Rezeau Cropsey's farm in Rossville on Staten Island, New York, the oldest of eight children. As a young boy, Cropsey had recurring periods of poor health. While absent from school, Cropsey taught himself to draw. His early drawings included architectural sketches and landscapes drawn on notepads and in the margins of his schoolbooks. Cropsey trained as an architect under the tuition of Joseph Trench in the early 1840s, a period in which he was also trained in watercolour painting, instructed by Edward Maury, and took some life drawing courses at the National Academy of Design. He set up his own architecture office in 1843, but began exhibiting his watercolours at the National Academy of Design in 1844. A year later he was elected an associate member and turned exclusively to landscape painting; shortly after he was featured in an exhibition entitled "Italian Compositions".
Cropsey travelled in Europe from 1847 to 1849, visiting England, France, Switzerland, and Italy. He was elected a full member of the Academy in 1851. Cropsey was a personal friend of Henry Tappan, the president of the University of Michigan from 1852 to 1863. At Tappan's invitation, he travelled to Ann Arbor in 1855 and produced two paintings, one of the Detroit Observatory, and a landscape of the campus. He went abroad again in 1856, and resided seven years in London, sending his pictures to the Royal Academy and to the International exhibition of 1862. his works fetch up to $660,000 US dollars.