A Country Home

A wide river valley opens beneath mountains, with trees along the banks, a small house in the distance, and a sunset glowing in green, gold, and brown tones across the sky. The scene forms a pastoral landscape, painted in oil in 1854, and it is held today at the Seattle Art Museum. It came into the museum's collection as a gift from Mrs. Paul C. Carmichael. The work was created by Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900), an American painter associated with the Hudson River school, whose landscapes include Catskill Sunset. One detail worth noticing is how the warm colors of the setting sun spread across the clouds, casting a soft light over the quiet valley and drawing the eye from the distant house toward the darker foreground trees, giving the composition a calm, expansive sense of depth.