About this work
opens at dusk. The viewer enters a sun-soaked world of sloping fields and sparse trees, with a farmer driving a wagon along a fence line behind a group of sheep in the lower left. But the true subject is light — specifically, a sun in the act of setting. At the spatial and thematic center, the sun illuminates the landscape from behind and the sky from below, pouring a blinding warmth across the scene. A blinding burst of sun threatens to immolate the scene, overwhelming the purple-gray hill in the distance, its late summer light held at bay only by small trees in the foreground.
Executed in oil on board at a substantial 40½ × 61½ inches, the canvas has an unusual directness — less constructed than intimate, more felt than composed.
The twenty-three-year-old Church spent the summer of 1849 in New England, settling in the region of Cuttingsville, Vermont, and this jewel-like study of a hilly field at sunset was likely made in the area.
Having recently become one of the youngest painters ever elected to New York's National Academy of Design, he spent his time in Vermont producing small studies to incorporate into larger canvases that he would exhibit in New York the following year.
Unlike his norm of working up landscapes from studio sketches, this painting looks as if it were painted on scene — it has an immediacy and intimacy absent from his famous grand landscapes, and a naivete in the brushwork that fits the modest, rural world of Yankee farmers.
The canvas is now held at Olana State Historic Site in Hudson, New York — Church's own estate — lending it a distinctly personal dimension within his life's work.
This is a painting that earns its place in rooms built for stillness: a study, a reading room, a dining space with good natural light on a western wall. Its palette — amber, violet, dusty green — moves through the hours of the day rather than freezing a single moment. What lingers is Church's attention to the spectacular effects of the sun's passage over the horizon, when the sky sets itself ablaze and transforms terrestrial bodies into shadowy silhouettes. It speaks to viewers drawn to the American pastoral without sentiment — those who want a landscape that holds both labor and transcendence in the same quiet frame.
