Summer Twilight

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.