Midsummer Twilight

Willard Leroy Metcalf

National Gallery of Art

We look down at and across a sun-soaked landscape with tile-roofed, white-stucco buildings and plowed fields in this horizontal painting. Slate-blue shadows cast by trees behind us shade a triangular, grassy outcropping in the lower left corner of the painting. The front edge of the outcropping faces away from us and is lined with gray boulders, perhaps a retaining wall. The land must dip steeply down beyond the boulders, for we look down onto the canopies of the trees lining the wall and the houses tucked up against the ridge. A few white birds fly among the terracotta-red roofs below us. Green fields roll back to more structures near a tree line to our left. The horizon comes about three-quarters of the way up the composition, and a few thin clouds skim across the sliver of opal-blue sky above. A peach-colored full moon rises low on the horizon in the left center of the sky. Visible dabs of paint and brushstrokes mimic the stucco on the buildings, the texture of the leaves, and the sweeping fields. The artist signed the painting with black paint in the lower left corner: “W. L. METCALF.”