The Juniata, Evening

Thomas Moran

National Gallery of Art

Far below us, a river winds through a valley lined with hazy mountains in this horizontal landscape painting. In the distance, the line of mountains emerges from the left, near the top of the canvas, and marches down toward the center, growing lighter and mistier in the distance. Streaks of olive-green growth drape down their sides, and pale sunlight from the upper right warms their craggy faces, which are painted in tones of peach, tan, taupe, and parchment white with pewter-gray fissures. The mountains move across the canvas and angle way from us, to our right. There, they are overlapped, just off center, by a tree-covered slope that emerges from the right. At its foot is a steel-gray river that winds from the lower right toward the center of the composition. The land sweeps down from the left side, spreading out into meadows that meet the river. They are carpeted in moss green with streaks and patches of rust-brown earth and scattered with clusters of trees painted in tones of celery, olive, and pine green. Closest to us and near the lower left corner of the painting, is a man, tiny in scale, on a flat bluff. He wears a white coat and trousers, and sits hunched on a stool facing our left. He looks toward a grove of trees with pea-green leaves and ginger-brown trunks that tower over him, along the left edge of the composition. He has turned away from a painting on an easel that stands just beyond him, and an open wooden box that sits on the ground behind him. A closed, seafoam-green parasol also lies nearby. Just beyond the lip of the bluff and down in the valley are creamy white dots that suggest livestock. Farther back, near the foot of the mountains, a cluster of buildings sit near the tree line in the meadow. Wispy white clouds drift through the light azure-blue sky. The artist signed and dated the painting in the lower left corner, “THOS.MORAN.1864 OP.8.”