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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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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.

National Gallery of Art · Painting

A Landscape after Sunset

Washington Allston

Date
c. 1819
Medium
oil on canvas
Dimensions
overall: 45.4 × 64.14 cm (17 7/8 × 25 1/4 in.) framed: 60.01 × 78.11 × 6.99 cm (23 5/8 × 30 3/4 × 2 3/4 in.)
Classification
Painting
Accession number
2015.19.96
Credit line
Corcoran Collection (Museum Purchase, William A. Clark Fund, Gallery Fund, and gifts of Orme Wilson, George E. Hamilton, Jr., and R. M. Kauffmann, 1963)
Time span
1801 to 1825
Department
CAB
Original NGA record Wikidata

Subjects and terms

  • painted surface
  • American
  • Acquired after publication of American Paintings of the Nineteenth Century, Part I [A-L]
  • Realist
  • landscape
  • Stream
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).

NGA object ID 177332. Collection metadata is reproduced under CC0. This work is included because its NGA published-image record is marked open access; visitors should recheck the source record before substantial reuse.