Twilight in the Wilderness (1860): Art, History and Details

Twilight in the Wilderness (1860) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Frederic Edwin Church (American, 1826–1900).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

In his New York studio, Church painted this spectacular view of a blazing sunset over wilderness near Mount Katahdin in Maine, which he had sketched during a visit nearly two years earlier. Although Church often extolled the grandeur of American landscape in his work, this painting appears to have additional overtones. Created on the eve of the Civil War, the painting's subject can be interpreted as symbolically evoking the coming conflagration. Church's considerable technical skills and clever showmanship contributed to his fame as the premier artist of his generation. Rather than debut this painting in an annual exhibition with works by other artists as was the custom, Church instead exhibited it by itself at a prestigious art gallery. Coaxed by advance publicity and highly favorable press reviews, several hundred spectators flocked to admire it during its seven-week run.

Object facts

• Title: Twilight in the Wilderness
• Date: 1860
• Creator attribution: Frederic Edwin Church (American, 1826–1900)
• Culture: United States
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on canvas
• Dimensions: Unframed: 101.6 x 162.6 cm (40 x 64 in.); Framed: 124 x 185 x 13 cm (48 13/16 x 72 13/16 x 5 1/8 in.)
• Collection: American - Painting
• Department: American Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1965.233

A detail from the museum

An image of this painting has a cameo in the Harrison Ford film Clear and Present Danger.

Collection credit

Mr. and Mrs. William H. Marlatt Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• New York Herald (June 8, 1860): 10.
• Lockwood de Forest, letter to Emily de Forest, Sept. 16, 1931, in CMA curatorial file.
• Franklin W. Kelly, letter to William S. Talbot, Oct. 21, 1982, in CMA curatorial file.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.