A Landscape after Sunset

Washington Allston

National Gallery of Art

Three cows drink in a placid body of water in front of a landscape dim with golden sunset light in this horizontal painting. The water creates white eddies around a few rocks as it travels from the lower left corner of the canvas, across the foreground, and off to the right. In the bottom right quadrant of the composition, one cow is white, and another dark brown. The third, tawny brown cow flicks her tail as she dips her head to the water. Tall groves of trees on the far side of the water fill most of the right half of the composition. To the left, a path curves from the waterside back into a grassy, tree-pocked landscape with buildings on one low hill and a very distant horizon, which comes halfway up this composition. A person wearing a red vest over a white long-sleeved shirt, dark blue, knee-length pants, and a brown, brimmed hat rides a white horse coming toward us on the path. A short-hair, pale gray dog runs ahead of the horse, toward the cows. From below the horizon, the sunlight sets the grassy fields to golden tan, and the sky above fades from buttery yellow along the horizon to pale blue along the top of the composition. Lines of clouds are lit mauve pink and shaded ultramarine blue.