The Return

Evening light is draining out of the sky as a small procession makes its way home. Two monks carry a litter, and on it lies the knight who rode out so confidently in the companion picture to this one. His white horse is led behind him, riderless. Around them, ordinary life carries on: cattle graze, a herdsman passes, children play near the stone shrine at the left. Nobody in the landscape seems to notice the small tragedy moving through it.

Thomas Cole painted this in 1837 as one half of a pair, together with The Departure, for the New York banker Samuel Ward. In the first painting it is morning in late spring, a castle dominates the scene, and the lord rides out with banners and trumpets. In this one it is autumn, the sun is setting, and the castle has been replaced by a Gothic church that pulls the eye upward with its spire. Cole, the English born painter usually credited with starting the Hudson River School, had spent years travelling in Europe sketching ruins and cathedrals, and he put all of that to use here in a landscape that never actually existed. He liked telling moral stories through scenery, and this pair is one of his simplest: life goes out in sunshine and comes back in shadow. The autumn oak on the right, blazing red against the cooling sky, does a lot of the emotional work.