The Libyan Desert, Sunset

William Blake Richmond's The Libyan Desert, Sunset (1888) belongs to the English painter's series of North African subjects painted following his Egyptian travels. Richmond, who later became better known as a muralist (he decorated St Paul's Cathedral), worked as an easel painter in the tradition of British Orientalist painting — depicting the desert landscapes and atmospheric effects of North Africa with a combination of topographic accuracy and romantic atmosphere. The Libyan desert sunset offered precisely the grand, empty, light-drenched subject that appealed to Victorian Orientalist taste.

Richmond renders the desert sunset with attention to the specific color of desert light at its most extreme: the warm gold-orange of the setting sun flooding a landscape stripped of vegetation and moisture, the sky above transitioning from deep blue to flame-orange at the horizon. The desert floor provides a flat, vast stage for this atmospheric drama. His brushwork in the sky is blended and luminous, while the desert foreground is rendered with more textural attention to sand and stone surfaces.