Twilight at Leeds, New York

Leeds is a hamlet on Catskill Creek in the Hudson Valley, a few miles from the village of Catskill, where Thomas Cole, the founder of the Hudson River School of landscape painting, had painted the same creek and hills a generation earlier. In 1876 Homer painted a hillside there at the close of the day. The sun has dropped behind a row of tall trees along the ridge, their shadows run in long diagonals down the slope, and cattle graze in the last of the light.

Low on the left he wrote HOMER and the year, of which only 187 can still be read. The canvas was still his when he died in 1910, and his brother Charles inherited it. Two years later the Boston dealers Doll and Richards sold it to Clara Bertram Kimball. Her husband David left it to the museum in 1923, one of 40 paintings he bequeathed in her memory.