The Four Times of Day: Evening
Joseph Vernet·1757
Historical Context
The Four Times of Day: Evening from 1757 depicts the golden hour that was perhaps Vernet's most successful atmospheric subject, connecting him to the tradition of Claude Lorrain's luminous sunset landscapes. The evening light transforms the landscape into a warm, poetic vision of a world touched by the last rays of the setting sun. Vernet's oil technique carefully observed the behavior of light on water and cloud at different times of day and in different weather conditions, building atmospheric effects through careful layering of translucent glazes. The evening pendant to his Morning, this work on copper demonstrates Vernet's mastery of warm, low-angle light — the long shadows, the golden reflections on water, the silhouetted architecture against a glowing sky — that had been the signature achievement of Claude's landscapes and that Vernet inherited and naturalized in his own more empirically grounded practice. The Art Gallery of South Australia holds both Morning and Evening from this series, preserving the pair in their intended comparative relationship.
Technical Analysis
The warm, golden palette of evening light suffuses the composition, with the low sun creating long shadows and rich color harmonies across the landscape and water.
Look Closer
- ◆The copper support gives the evening scene a particular luminosity—warm orange tones permeating.
- ◆Vernet's evening on copper achieves the atmospheric warmth of the actual Golden Hour in material.
- ◆Figures in the evening scene are silhouetted against the lit sky and water—dark forms.
- ◆The water surface at evening catches the last light in long horizontal reflections of warm colour.
