Twilight on the Sound, Darien, Connecticut

Painted in 1872 and held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, this Luminist view of Long Island Sound at twilight by Kensett is among the last paintings he completed before his death in December 1872. Darien, Connecticut provided him the quiet coastal scenery he had sought since the 1850s, and the twilight hour gave him the most extreme example of the atmospheric dissolution he pursued. As the sun sets over the Sound, the water becomes a mirror of the sky's warm glow, and the distinction between sea and atmosphere softens to near-unity in a composition of extreme formal simplicity.

Kensett reduces the composition to near-abstraction: a thin strip of warm, sunset-lit water and sky, divided by the horizontal line of the opposite shore at Darien. His paint application at twilight becomes even more refined than in his daylight works, building the gradations of warm to cool through the most delicate layering of thin, transparent strokes.