Sunset Sky

John Frederick Kensett

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This lovingly wrought study, perhaps set down in direct witness but more likely freshly recollected, was never developed into a finished painting, but became the obvious source of the artist's "Sunset". Along with "Sunset on the Sea" and a few other pictures of his late career, Kensett uncharacteristically indulged a warm, highly saturated palette at variance with the pearly gray tonality of his signature style. At the acme of an enviously successful career and in the relative privacy of his island studio in Long Island Sound, Kensett may well have felt a license that he had not previously to broaden, in his typically measured terms, his aesthetic vocabulary—here to include the richly chromatic effects of J. M. W. Turner or even those that marked the pictures of his colleagues Frederic E. Church and Sanford R. Gifford.

The American Wing

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The American Wing's ever-evolving collection comprises some 20,000 works of art by African American, Euro American, Latin American, and Native American men and women. Ranging from the colonial to early-modern periods, the holdings include painting, sculpture, works on paper, and decorative arts—including furniture, textiles, ceramics, glass, silver, metalwork, jewelry, basketry, quill and bead embroidery—as well as historical interiors and architectural fragments.

Metropolitan Museum of Art