Where to See Summer Twilight: Private Collection, Unknown

Thomas Cole, founder of the Hudson River School, painted this luminous New England scene in 1834. A pastoral landscape glows with benign sunset light, homesteads nestled comfortably among mountains, water, and sky. An ax-hewn stump at lower left hints at the coming of European settlement.

Cole painted this alongside its companion, Autumn Twilight, while developing his monumental series The Course of Empire. Both smaller paintings preview that series' themes of civilization's rise and fall, placed in an American context. The painting belongs to the New-York Historical Society.

The painting belongs to the New-York Historical Society. Cole exhibited it alongside its companion Autumn Twilight at the National Academy of Design in 1834.

Cole founded the Hudson River School, the first American art movement. These Romantic painters celebrated the American wilderness as a source of spiritual and national identity.

An ax-hewn stump at lower left signals European settlement. Man and nature exist in harmony here, but Cole's larger Course of Empire series would explore civilization's eventual decline.

Summer Twilight

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More by Thomas Cole

Falls of the Kaaterskill

The Clove, Catskills (Double impact)

Landscape Composition. St John in the Wilderness

View in the White Mountains

Also at Private Collection

Faun

Lorenzaccio

Marie Gallén at the Kuhmoniemi-bridge

A Beggar Warming his Hands over a Chafing Dish

Mountain Sunrise

Autumn Landscape (Mount Chocorua)

Mount Chocorua, New Hampshire

Two Views of an Indian from Calcutta, Seated and Standing

The bather

Morning, Looking East over the Hudson Valley from Catskill Mountains

Niagara

Washington Crossing the Delaware

Lake George

Fur Traders Descending the Missouri

East Bergholt Rectory

Among the Sierra Nevada, California

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