Golden Hour by Richard Wieth is an upright impressionist landscape in which a cluster of trees fills nearly the whole canvas. A main trunk rises just left of center and splits into several limbs that reach up and out into the leaves, while a slimmer second trunk stands to the right. Foliage closes over the top of the picture. Only a pale opening on the left lets the eye travel out toward the distance.
Color carries the title. The trunks are lit in coral, burnt orange and warm pink on the side facing the light, with cool blue shadow gathering at the base of the main tree. Around them the canopy is built from deep teal, forest green, olive and blue-black, broken by flecks of lemon yellow, pale blue and sage. At the left edge a glowing yellow field of color gives way to a hazy gray-blue band, then to meadow greens warmed with strokes of orange. Warm and cool sit side by side, so the orange reads brighter against the greens.
Light is described through shifts of color rather than detail. Instead of drawing individual leaves, Richard Wieth sets down separate dabs of light green and blue that stand in for sun filtering through the canopy, and the darker masses between them feel like shade. The bark takes its form from a few long, narrow strokes of orange that run along the trunk, with a deeper violet-brown on the shadow side. Branches cross the foliage as short, bright diagonals, and some dissolve into the leaves without a clear edge.
The paint is applied in blocky, tapped and dragged touches, many thick enough to catch their own small shadows. In the upper right the dark passages turn gritty and stippled, and across the canvas the weave shows through wherever the paint is thin. The yellow clearing at the left is smoother and more fluid, which sets it apart from the heavily worked canopy. Near the bottom the ground breaks into horizontal strokes of green, blue, mauve and orange, with no outlines holding them in place.
The brightest and warmest marks sit in the main trunk and the glowing clearing, so the eye goes there first. It then moves up the limbs into the canopy and back down through the horizontal bands of the ground. The large dark mass on the right balances the open light on the left. Values stay mostly in the mid-to-dark range, with the yellow patch as the lightest note, which gives this impressionist landscape painting a quiet, late-day mood.
It is oil on canvas, 20 x 16 inches (50.8 x 40.6 cm), and it is sold unframed. The size suits a living room, dining room, hallway, bedroom, reading nook or office wall, on its own or beside other work.
Since the canvas has no frame, plan on adding one. A warm walnut or honey-toned wood frame would pick up the orange of the trunks. A thin black or deep green float-style frame would deepen the shadows and let the yellow clearing stand out.
