1865
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
The Golden Hour is a 1865 by Samuel Palmer, a Impressionism work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You see a fiery sunset over rolling green hills, painted in thick, glowing pinks and golds. Palmer made this late in life, when his eyesight was failing. The colors feel almost too bright to be real—like he was trying to hold onto light itself. The clouds look soft enough to touch, but the paint is thick and textured, almost like paste. If you like this dreamy English countryside, look up Samuel Palmer (British, 1805–1881) for more of his quiet, glowing landscapes.
Samuel Palmer developed a personal and emotionally charged style of landscape painting that celebrated nature as the product of divine creation. This watercolor of a spectacularly colorful sunset over the hills of Surrey was painted by Palmer toward the end of his life. An autumn sky heavy with rows of cumulus clouds shimmers in a pattern of pink and amethyst, as slivers of golden light emanate from the setting sun. The idyllic landscape is an elegy not only to a passing day, but to the brevity of life itself.
Around the time this watercolor was made, Samuel Palmer began to focus primarily on naturalistic landscapes that he hoped would be commercially successful in order to contend with the practical responsibilities of married life and family.
Read the full account in the museum source.
Samuel Palmer Hon.RE (Hon. Fellow of the Society of Painter-Etchers) (27 January 1805 – 24 May 1881) was a British landscape painter, etcher and printmaker. He was also a prolific writer. Palmer was a key figure in…
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