Paintings by the Hudson River School artist Jasper Cropsey reside in the White House, the National Gallery of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and museums at Yale and Princeton, but the best place to commune with Cropsey’s glorious 19th-century landscapes is in an oasis in Hastings-on-Hudson.

Not far from the rush of Metro-North trains on the Hudson Line, behind a commuter parking lot, is the Gallery of Art, which houses roughly 75 paintings spanning the career of an artist who idolized Thomas Cole and taught himself to paint well enough to join the likes of John Frederick Kensett and Frederic Edwin Church in the Hudson River School’s top tier.