Sunset on White Mountains

Louis Rémy Mignot (1861)

How does this painting show the passage of time?

This painting is one of Mignot’s few North American scenes. “The artist has dipped his brush in the ‘colors of America,’” one contemporary critic observed. Another, responding to Mignot’s 1876 memorial exhibition, wrote: “His skies are very remarkable. Sunsets would seem to have been his delight; and no wonder, for his facility for representing upon canvas the delicate and beautiful tints produced by the rays of declining light illuminating the fringy edges of clouds, is perfectly marvelous.”

\ Artist

Louis Rémy Mignot

American
Born:
1831
Died:
1870
Death place:
Brighton, United Kingdom

Louis Rémy Mignot was born in Charleston, South Carolina, and studied art in the Netherlands and New York. He traveled with Frederic Edwin Church to Ecuador in 1856, subsequently painting many South American scenes from the sketches he made on this trip. Mignot’s dramatic palette may reflect the new commercial pigments that became available in the 1850s. His detailed rendering reveals the influence of the British critic John Ruskin, who urged artists to study and depict nature faithfully.

\ About

Medium

Oil on canvas

Credit

Museum purchase, Ednah Root Fund in honor of Marc Simpson