Sunset by John Frederick Kensett

John Frederick Kensett's 'Sunset' from 1872 is among the very last canvases the artist ever painted. He died in December of that year, at fifty-six, after contracting pneumonia while rescuing a fellow artist's wife from drowning. The painting reads now as a quiet, accidental witness to a life's closing light.

Look at how little solid ground Kensett gives us. A low fringe of shoreline rocks at the lower left, a dark headland anchoring the right edge, and between them, an ocean so still and dark it reads almost as a void. The sun is a tiny disk near the horizon, but its reflection draws a column straight down the center of the water, the one energetic axis in the whole composition. At the upper right, a cooler gray cloud mass presses in from the east, the only hint that this warmth is temporary.

The painting belongs to the Luminist tradition: thin glazes of oil let light seem to come from inside the canvas rather than bounce off its surface. Kensett was a second-generation Hudson River School painter, but he rejected the dramatic mountains and storms of Thomas Cole for exactly this kind of spare, glassy stillness. He helped found the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This work now lives in The American Wing.

A painting this restrained holds its emotion in the edges. Ask yourself what that cooler cloud in the upper right means to you, and whether the figure standing on that dark shore knows the sun is about to set.