The well-known and witty cynic Oscar Wilde once declared, “Nobody of any real culture, for instance, ever talks nowadays about the beauty of sunset. Sunsets are quite old fashioned. To admire them is a distinct sign of provincialism of temperament. Upon the other hand, they do go on.”
Whether or not we admit it, sunsets, a favorite subject of artists and poets, can still take our breath away. They have an incredible visual beauty and serve as a potent metaphor for life, especially its end. Or rather, the end of life. The poet Anne Sexton wrote, “All day I’ve built a lifetime and now the sun sinks to undo it.” Probably the most famous “sunset” poem ever written is Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “Crossing the Bar,” a plea for his friends not to mourn his death which begins, “Sunset and evening star and one clear call for me!” So sunset may indicate the passing of a day, a lifetime, an epoch.
First, however, it may sting us with its beauty. And that is its most potent call, and challenge, to artists - as we see in the painting by Asher Durand, called simply Landscape, Sunset. Durand was one of the early proponents of the Hudson River School style of painting, later known as the first great American artistic movement. The symbolism we frequently associate with sunsets was largely absent from Hudson River School works. Their creators wanted to evoke the presence of beauty, not its passing. Durand is showing us a scene intended to display the most beautiful moment he could conceive – and the most beautiful American moment – for only America possessed this pristine wilderness.
The Hudson River School wasn’t a school of art at all, but merely a common subject matter and style. It began as the brainchild of Thomas Cole, a friend of poet and publisher William Cullen Bryant who publicized the artist’s work widely. So sure was Bryant of the superiority of the Hudson River School concepts that he wrote what was in effect its mission statement:
Our own scenery has its peculiarities . . . a far spread wildness, a look as if the new world was fresher from the hand of Him who made it . . . suggested the idea of unity and immensity and abstracting the mind from the associations of human agency, carried it up to the idea of a mightier power and to the great mystery of the origin of things.
What better way to display Bryant’s words than through the beauty and serenity of a sunset in the mountains untainted by men’s temporal longings. Compared to some of the other Hudson River School paintings, Cole’s is a rather tame and muted sunset. Part of this reflected
a philosophic choice, but part of it was because Cole was painting before three significant
commercial colors, chromium red, chromium yellow, and chromium purple were available to artists.
To see what a Hudson River School painter can do with the more spectacular qualities of a sunset then, let’s loook at the work of Thomas Moran, one of the big three of the later Hudson River School painters, along with Frederic Church and Albert Bierstadt. Moran also influenced the Luminists, an offshoot of the Hudson River School painters who focused on qualities of light. You can see how they drew from Moran when you observe the sensation of light he evokes in his vivid crimsons, slashes of golden yellow, and deep purple shadows in this very dramatic Sunset, La Rita, New Mexico.
Instead of sad displays of the passing of time, Moran’s sunsets were gloriously rendered evocations of the future on the western horizon. In early European cultures, particularly that of the Celts, the West had a special symbolic power. The Celts believed that the Blessed Isles arose in the Western Sea. Those bodies included the Island of the Ever-Young, the place of eternal youth and happiness to which one traveled after death. In short, heaven was a physical place located in the West.
Many Americans and would-be Americans had the same idea. Alfred Bierstadt’s Emigrants Resting at Sunset is not a painting about how day dies and takes a piece of our lives with it. Rather, his depiction of day’s end holds the promise of a golden future awaiting us on the horizon. The “rest” in this painting is not waiting to enfold us; it is the rest that refreshes in order to charge a new day. It is Manifest Destiny made manifest in paint.
George Inness began his career as a Hudson River School painter, but soon felt the influence of the Barbizon School, a movement that began in early 19th-century France and came to America a few decades later. Like their Hudson River School counterparts, Barbizon painters focused on landscapes, but invested their canvases with emotional and spiritual concerns of the painter in efforts to evoke particular emotional responses from the viewer. Such works often contained spiritual as well as affective suggestions. Inness, for example, fell under the teachings of the mystic Emanuel Swedenborg and tried to incorporate them in his paintings.
He creates Sunset with a soft focus and nostalgic ambiance, rendered with a very painterly method that indicates how the artist expects to make us feel. Inness is invoking the rather melancholic emotions that sunsets may cause to arise in us by the way he chooses to depict his landscape. He wishes us to think not only of the passing of this life, but the life, if any, beyond. The beauty and pathos implicit in his work may may remind us of Shakespeare’s admonition that “Men shut their doors against a setting sun.”
More modern works of sunsets evoke both visual splendor and philosophic metaphor. Like many American landscape painters, D. Michael McCarthy was very influenced by the Hudson River School painters, particularly Thomas Moran, whose influence can be seen in Evening on the Verde. A native of Los Angeles, McCarthy has specialized in painting the Southwest, though his travels have taken him to many picturesque locations around the world, including the Hebrides and Malaysia. He prefers to depict more remote regions, where he finds wilderness sites almost as pristine as those his mentors captured. His sunsets carry some of the foreshadowing of loss we associate with that imagery. Unlike the Hudson River School artists, however, McCarthy is aware of the relative fragility of these landscapes.
McCarthy isn’t the only contemporary artist who has drawn from the works of the great 19th century American landscape painters. Many consider Loren D. Adams, Jr. among the best of contemporary marine painters. The sea fascinated him early in his career. He admired the seaside depictions of the Luminists, other marine artists such as J.M.W. Turner, and more contemporary painters such as James Peter Cost and Peter Ellenshaw, both of which are also represented in the Gallery. Adams pays particular attention to composition and chromatic changes, but also includes mythological and spiritual symbols in his works. He tries to create a sense of grandeur caught in a particular moment of time. So his work in paintings like The Burning Image evokes a metaphorical sense of transience as well as a masterful control of visual properties.
Twenty-first century painters like Adams and McCarthy are aware of both the incomparable beauty and the relative fragility of our world. Their sunsets blend the foreshadowing of loss we associate with sunset imagery with the hopeful hunger and conditional optimism of the later Hudson River School painters.
Everl Adair, Director of Reserch and Rare Collections
