Artist: Frederic Edwin Church
Topic: Night
Date: 1860
Museum: Cleveland Museum of Art (United States)
Thanks to some eagle-eyed collecting by Sherman Lee, who led the Cleveland Museum of Art from 1958 to 1983, the institution bought Church's 1860 "Twilight in the Wilderness," one of his greatest paintings, in 1965. The big panorama, which depicts a fiery sunset over a mountain lake in Maine, can usually be found in the museum's 19th-century galleries, where it holds court among works by Church's peers, including Cole and Bierstadt.