A Landscape after Sunset

c. 1819

Washington Allston

Painter, American, 1779 - 1843

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.

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Artwork overview

Artwork history & notes

Provenance

Purchased February 1820 from the artist by Charles Russell Codman [1784-1852], Boston;[1] by descent to his son, James McMaster Codman [1831-1917], Boston; by inheritance to his daughter, Cora Codman Wolcott, Brookline; (her estate sale, Louis Joseph, Inc., Auctioneers, Boston, 13 May 1954, no. 492); unknown buyer; purchased by (Eunice Chambers, Hartsville, South Carolina); purchased 1957 by Dr. Irving Levitt, Detroit;[2] purchased December 1962 by (Hirschl and Adler Galleries, New York); sold 1963 to the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington; acquired 2014 by the National Gallery of Art.
[1] Codman's account book records the purchase: "Feb 1820/ W. Allston for a Picture 150" (Papers of Charles Russell Codman, in the Codman Family Papers, MS001.08, Historic New England, Boston). For this information and additional details about the descent of the painting in Codman's family, see the e-mail of 4 October 2006 from Richard Nylander, Senior Curator at Historic New England, Haverhill, Massachusetts, to Jenny Carson of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, in NGA curatorial files.
[2] See correspondence between Chambers and Levitt, Joseph Downs Collection of Manuscripts and Printed Ephemera, collection 451, box 1, folder 1 [papers of Eunice Chambers], The Winterthur Library, Delaware (copies in NGA curatorial files).

Associated Names

Exhibition History

1827

  • First Annual Exhibition of Paintings at the Boston Athenaeum, 10 May - 10 July 1827, no. 33.

1839

  • Exhibition of Pictures Painted by Washington Allston, Harding's Gallery, Boston, 25 April - 10 July 1839, no. 18.

1850

  • Twenty-fourth Annual Exhibition of Paintings at the Boston Athenaeum, 27 May - October 1850, no. 86.

1881

  • Exhibition of Works by Washington Allston, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, May - July 1881, no. 226.

1961

  • Romantic America, John Herron Art Institute, Indianapolis, 8 January - 5 February 1961, no. 2.

1962

  • American Paintings and Drawings from Michigan Collections, Detroit Institute of Arts, 10 April - 6 May 1962, no. 9, repro.

1963

  • Progress of an American Collection, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, 26 October - 29 December 1963, unpublished checklist.

1971

  • The Beckoning Land, Nature and the American Artist: A Selection of Nineteeth Century Paintings, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, 18 April - 13 June 1971, no. 3, repro.

1976

  • Corcoran [The American Genius], Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, 1976, no checklist.

1978

  • The American Landscape Tradition, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, 1978, unpublished checklist.

1979

  • A Man of Genuis: The Art of Washington Allston (1779-1843), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, 11 December 1979 - 27 April 1980, no. 55.

1993

  • The Century Club Collection, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 21 July - 13 September 1993, unpublished checklist.

2005

  • Encouraging American Genius: Master Paintings from the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, NY; Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte; John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, 2005-2007, checklist no. 10.

2013

  • American Journeys: Visions of Place, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, 21 September 2013 - 28 September 2014, unpublished checklist.

Bibliography

2011

  • Staiti, Paul. "A Landscape After Sunset." In Corcoran Gallery of Art: American Paintings to 1945. Edited by Sarah Cash. Washington, 2011: 68-69, 257, repro.

Wikidata ID

Q46626639

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