Nobody can look straight at the sun, yet painters have kept putting it in their pictures, and they have taken liberties with it. On this page, one sunset sits on the wrong side of the sky, and a critic's joke about a hazy harbor at dawn gives a whole movement its name.
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Paint is never brighter than the white of the canvas, and the real sun is too bright to look at. So a painter who puts it in a picture has to suggest its glare through the colors around it.
That difficulty never stopped painters, because the sun does more than light a scene. It fixes the hour of the scene, and it gives the eye a single point to travel toward, even when it sits outside the frame.
The rule for this list is that the sun has to run the picture, whether it hangs in plain view or glows from somewhere out of frame. It sets the colors, the shadows or the meaning, and the higher the rank, the more the picture depends on it.
12. George Inness, Afterglow (1893)
Almost the full height of George Inness's Afterglow is taken by one tree, black against an orange sky. The sun that lights that sky has already set. In 1893, a year before his death, Inness gave the picture a title that names exactly what is left: the light that lingers once the disc is gone.
The format itself breaks with habit. A landscape is usually wider than it is tall, but Inness chose an upright canvas and gave its whole height to the tree. On the horizon, at either side, low farm buildings are already half lost in the dusk.
The reason for such a picture lies in what Inness believed. He took his ideas about nature from Emanuel Swedenborg, a Swedish mystic who taught that everything in the visible world corresponds to a spiritual reality. For a painter who believed that, a tree at dusk carried an inner meaning, and that feeling mattered more to him than an exact view of a real place.
So the crown has no hard edges. Inness let its outlines go soft as the light fades, and he left a single break in the leaves near the top, the only place where the orange sky shows through the dark mass.
At a Glance
Artist: George Inness (1825 to 1894)
Painted: 1893
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 76.5 × 64.1 cm (30 × 25 in)
Where to see it: Art Institute of Chicago
11. Claude Lorrain, A Seaport at Sunrise (1674)
Low on the horizon, at the exact center of Claude Lorrain's A Seaport at Sunrise, the sun lays a path of light across the harbor straight toward the viewer. In 1674, at about seventy, Claude found himself painting a harbor he had already painted forty years earlier, and the decision was not entirely his.