page_title: Twilight in the Wilderness
section_title: Reception and interpretation
hierarchical_section_title: Twilight in the Wilderness / Reception and interpretation
context_page_description: Twilight in the Wilderness is an 1860 oil painting by American painter Frederic Edwin Church. The woodlands of the northeastern United States are shown against a setting sun that intensely colors the dramatic altocumulus clouds. Church scholar John K. Howat describes the painting as "one of his finest ever" and as "the single most impressive example of Church's depictions of unsullied North American woodlands and their most famous representation in nineteenth-century painting".
context_section_description: In 1860 the painting was exhibited from June 8 to July 25 at Goupil's in New York City. It was well received, with contemporary viewers relating its purity of nature with spirituality. Critics described it as a "scene unhistoric, with no other interest than that of a wilderness, without human association of any kind" and "Nature with folded hands, kneeling at her evening prayer". Others saw "merely" nature, such as the Cosmopolitan Art Journal, which called it "unworthy of the artist, being a mere piece of scene painting, which it was a vanity to exhibit".
  Huntington emphasized the connection between pristine wilderness and the cultural sense of American exceptionalism. He highlighted the painting tradition that Church incorporated, and reinvented, for a uniquely American art: 
  [Twilight in the Wilderness] was his final solution to the heroic representation of the New World's classic image.... Church had learned what he could from Cole and from the Dusseldorf painters. Turner, Ruskin, and the Old Masters were the influences which would henceforth guide Church to his maturity.... in Twilight in the Wilderness, Church for the first time presented this all-important American subject at the level of history-painting in the Great Tradition—an Adamic Poussin. He caused the trees in this painting to act like the figures in the Old Masters he collected; yet the trees appear to be perfectly natural.... To create it, Church may well have heeded Ruskin's counsel that the artist should respond to the spiritual message suggested in nature's transcendent moments.... According to American doctrine, pure nature's "transcendent moments" should be accessible to all: no need for an Anglican "High Priest of Nature" to intercede between man and his universe.... As New World man and therefore "Nature's favorite," he was quite content with nature as she was.... His responsibility to humanity on this side of the Atlantic was not to manipulate but to re-create nature, quintessential nature.
  For receptive viewers, the painting contains discrete religious symbols: the tree stump is a "wilderness altar" on which there is a small cross formed of wood splinters, and the outline of an angel is apparent; the three trees that frame the scene at right symbolize the three crosses at Calvary. Huntington suggests that a small cloud fragment (or alternately a small gap in the clouds), located by following the line of the tree stump, evokes the "Dove of the Holy Spirit". 
  The American wilderness and turbulent sky pictured here, as night descends, have been interpreted apocalyptically, as a metaphor for a country falling into discord on the brink of the Civil War. In this context, the painting is considered patriotic. Sanford Robinson Gifford's A Twilight in the Catskills (1860) has been interpreted similarly.
caption: Sanford Robinson Gifford's A Twilight in the Catskills (1861)
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