Cross at Sunset

Cross at Sunset is an unfinished oil painting on canvas by Thomas Cole, made around 1848, the year of his death, and now in the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid (inv. 96). It measures 81.8 by 122.4 cm.

The picture comes from the last, intensely religious phase of Cole's career. Although he had always held that the direct contemplation of nature could give landscape painting spiritual and moral substance, his religious feeling deepened with age. In 1844, influenced by the Reverend Louis Legrand Noble, he was baptised into the Episcopal Church, and he decided to devote his painting to the Church, turning his studio into a workshop and oratory. In his final years he worked in near-monastic seclusion on a series he called The Cross and the World, which he left unfinished. The Thyssen museum notes that Cross at Sunset is not part of that series but is very close to it in spirit.

A massive stone cross stands in the right foreground, glowing with its own light. Some way off to the left rises the bell tower of a monastery, and behind both a valley recedes towards mountains on the horizon. The rays of the setting sun open out like a fan, the same motif Cole had used two years earlier in Gothic Ruins and Sunset, and the museum reads their glow as a reference to the divine light of the Creation answered by the radiance of the cross. Such drama and theatricality, aimed at a moral effect, are typical of his work.

Because the canvas was never completed, its making is unusually visible: the underdrawing shows through, as does the orange-toned ground Cole laid in across the lower part of the composition. Cole's attachment to the cross as a theme also appears in a poem he wrote a year before his death, whose closing lines the museum relates directly to this painting.