Mountain Landscape at Sunset

Jean Honoré Fragonard

National Gallery of Art

The dark, forest-green canopies of trees to our right are silhouetted against a sky that warms from pale blue along the top edge of the composition to butter yellow along the horizon, which comes about a quarter of the way up this horizontal landscape painting. The scene is loosely painted so many details are vague and difficult to make out. Closest to us, a diagonal band of caramel brown leading from the lower left corner back to the dark green could be the thick trunk of a felled tree, indicating that we look along the trunk into the massive canopy of an old tree, or the light brown could loosely suggest a forest. The horizon beyond is lined with a band of smoky purple, which could be a mountain range in the deep distance. Pale plum-purple clouds edged with shell pink angle from the horizon to the upper right corner against the golden sky.