Landscape, American Scenery: Time, Afternoon, with a Southwest Haze

Edmund Dwight ordered this landscape from Allston in 1835. Dwight was a Boston merchant who had put his money into cotton mills on the Chicopee River in western Massachusetts, and three years later he offered 10,000 dollars toward the state's first schools for training teachers, on condition that the legislature match it. Allston, by then living in Cambridgeport across the river from Boston, gave the picture a title that reads like a line from a weather diary, the time of day and the quarter the haze came from.

The title names no place. A rider on a white horse fords a stream beside a dead tree, and everything beyond softens into the haze. The conservator Joyce Hill Stoner, studying how Allston worked, found that the misty distance is made of reddish-brown glazes of asphaltum, a tar-like pigment, with little solid paint beneath. The picture stayed with the Dwights, and his son, also named Edmund, left it to the museum in 1900.