Autumn gives a painter a few weeks of color, and a single night of wind can end them. Several of the pictures on this list were finished long after the leaves had fallen. In London, one painter's reds were so unfamiliar that visitors accused him of inventing them.
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How These Were Chosen
All summer, the green in a leaf hides yellows and oranges that are already there. As the days shorten, the green drains away and those colors come through. Then one night of wind and rain can strip a tree bare.
Painters have answered that short window in two ways. Most catch the color at its peak and set it against a cool blue sky, which keeps the oranges from going flat. Others wait until the color is gone and let bare branches or the work of the harvest give away the month.
The rule here was that the season had to be visible, in the leaves or in what people do before winter. A tree that merely happens to be orange did not qualify. The pictures run from the least known to the most famous.
12. Winslow Homer, Autumn (1877)
Everything here turns on a pair of white gloves. A young woman in a black jacket and a round black hat stands on a slope covered in fallen leaves, holding a bunch of orange leaves she has just picked up, and her gloves are spotless. Winslow Homer painted her in 1877 and signed the lower right corner "HOMER '77."
Homer gave her a tall, narrow canvas, almost twice as high as it is wide, with room for one standing figure and the woods around her and for nothing else.
That leaves her clothes in full view, and they belong to the city. Her jacket is trimmed with bronze at the shoulders, cuffs and front, a gauzy bow is tied at her throat, and her tan skirt, lined in sky blue, ends in white flounces that trail over the leaves. With one hand she lifts the skirt clear of the ground.
Around that outfit, Homer painted a forest in rust orange and pine green. The ground under her shoes runs through red, brown, yellow and green, the whole range of a forest floor late in the year.
The gloves are where the two meet. She has just gathered a handful of leaves off a damp forest floor, and not a speck of it has reached her fingers. She is a visitor to these woods, and one pair of white gloves is enough to say so.
At a Glance
Artist: Winslow Homer (1836 to 1910)
Painted: 1877
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 97.1 x 58.9 cm (38 1/4 x 23 3/16 in)
Where to see it: National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
11. Alfred Sisley, Autumn: Banks of the Seine near Bougival (1873)
Most of this canvas is sky. Trees in their fall colors line the Seine at Bougival, a river town just west of Paris, but they get only a thin band along the water, their reflection a second thin band below, and pale, streaked sky fills more than half the picture.
A boat is moored at a small wooden landing on the near bank. Alfred Sisley, who lived in Louveciennes on the hillside just above, painted the view in 1873. The following spring it hung in the exhibition that gave Impressionism its name, and yet no visitor could find it in the catalogue.