Twilight in the Wilderness

Frederic Church finished this sunset in 1860, the year before the United States tore itself in two. It shows a stretch of northeastern woodland under a sky of burning red cloud, with no people anywhere in it. The only living thing is a single small bird perched at the left. Church was the most celebrated landscape painter in America at the time, and viewers then and since have read this blazing, empty sky as a country on the edge of the Civil War, the calm before the burning. Whether or not he meant it that way, the timing is hard to ignore. Fort Sumter was fired on within a year of the paint drying. Church built the whole effect out of one ordinary evening, the sun already gone behind the hills, the clouds still holding its colour.