Twilight in the Wilderness

Frederic Edwin Church completed this painting in 1860 from sketches he had made about two years earlier in the Maine wilderness near Mount Katahdin. Like other large American landscapes of the period, it was worked up in a New York studio from studies made outdoors. Rather than send it to a group exhibition, Church put it on show by itself at Goupil's gallery in New York, where it hung for seven weeks in the summer of 1860 and drew several hundred visitors. Presenting a single large canvas as a paid attraction was a strategy he used repeatedly, and it helped make him the best-known American landscape painter of his generation. Because the picture appeared in the months before the American Civil War began, later scholars have often read it as a premonition of the coming conflict, though Church himself left no statement to that effect. He was born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1826 and went to Catskill, New York, in 1844 to study with Thomas Cole, working with him for two years. Cole was the founder of the loose circle of American landscape painters later called the Hudson River School, who argued that wild American scenery deserved to be treated as seriously as European history painting. Church went further than his teacher in both scale and the distances he travelled for subjects, working from Maine and Labrador to the Andes.