Twilight in the Wildnerness

A blazing orange-and-crimson sunset floods an untouched American wilderness, its fire mirrored in a still river winding between dark forested hills, not a single human figure in sight. Frederic Edwin Church painted this pristine, glowing solitude in 1860, on the eve of the Civil War, and many have read the burning sky as an unconscious foreboding of the coming bloodshed. Now in Cleveland, Twilight in the Wilderness is a masterpiece of luminism - the Hudson River School's worship of American nature raised to a pitch of radiant, almost apocalyptic intensity.