Twilight in the Wilderness (1)
CHURCH, Frederick Edwin (1826-1900 USA)
162.6 cm high
United States, Ohio, Cleveland Museum of Art

Description:
This monumental landscape painting freezes the advance of nightfall at a moment of poignant illumination. A bold yellow band marks the horizon where the sun has disappeared over a remote woods and pond. However, the foreground and much of the sky is growing obscure, setting in relief the embers of twilight streaking across the clouds, water, and trees. Although exact in its natural detail, the painting is not a realistic portrayal of a precise scene but a distillation of Church's experiences of and beliefs about the American landscape. It shows Church's sense of a divine presence in nature, a belief nurtured by his teacher Thomas Cole and by his reading of Ralph Waldo Emerson. It also reveals his reading of the great German naturalist Alexander von Humbolt (1769-1859), whose scientific expedition in South America led him to a theory of "unity in diversity of phenomena: a harmony, blending together all created things, however dissimilar in form and attributes; one great whole animated by the breath of life." Church read Humbolt's writings in translation during the 1850s and followed his footsteps in South America, producing paintings of magisterial precision like Heart of the Andes (1859). This painting from the following year is North American in subject, but its sense of foreboding darkness does reveal a "unity in diversity of phenomena." In this natural landscape, painted on the eve of the Civil War, one inevitably feels the gathering forces of a larger national darkness.