Twilight in the Wilderness

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Twilight in the Wilderness: Frederic Edwin Church

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Art Type: Oil Painting
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Frederic Edwin Church Oil Painting - Twilight in the Wilderness

Keywords: Twilight, Wilderness

Work Overview: Twilight in the Wilderness
Frederic Edwin Church
Date: 1860
Style: Luminism
Genre: cloudscape
Oil on canvas
101.6 x 162.6 cm
The Cleveland Museum of Art

Frederic Edwin Church was one of our country’s consummate artistic talents, and his masterpiece, Twilight in the Wilderness (1860), ranks among the Cleveland Museum of Art’s most admired paintings. This fall, beginning Saturday, October 4, we will showcase the majestic work in a special focus exhibition, Maine Sublime: Frederic Church’s Twilight in the Wilderness, displaying it alongside nearly two dozen the artist painted the canvas in his New York studio, partly basing it on sketches he produced during travels near Mount Katahdin in Maine. Two sketches from Olana that closely relate to Twilight in the Wilderness are highlighted in the exhibition.
Although Church often extolled the breathtaking beauty and sublimity of America’s pristine wilderness in drawn and painted sketches from the artist’s own private collection at Olana, his historic home, studio, and landscaped property on the Hudson River. Several are on public view for the first time.
Rendered with a scientific realism that reflects Church’s abiding interest in natural history, Twilight in the Wilderness is a spectacular view of a blazing sunset over a distant purple mountain. Cloaked amid quickening nightfall, its foreground features a dark crimson lake flanked by masses of dramatically twisted and attenuated trees. Even if the exact scene it depicts is open to debate—in fact, some historians surmise it may be a composite view of multiple locations—it is known that his work, our painting appears to have additional overtones, particularly because twilight is a transitional time so visibly evolving toward an end. Created on the eve of the Civil War, when its outbreak appeared inevitable, the painting’s subject can be perceived as symbolically evoking the coming conflagration; indeed, one scholar has memorably described the painting as a “natural apocalypse.” Other interpretations include the possibility that Twilight in the Wilderness references the increasingly threatened state of our country’s unspoiled natural environment, already an issue during the artist’s day.

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Frederic Edwin Church

Work Overview