Eagle Lake Viewed from Cadillac Mountain, Mt. Desert Island, Maine

Download3000 × 1964 px View on a wall Edit

Artist: Frederic Edwin Church (American, 1826–1900)
Medium: Oil and graphite on paperboard; verso: graphite
Size: 29.4 × 44.5 cm (11 9/16 × 17 1/2 in.)
Museum: Smithsonian Institution
Rights: CC0 — no rights reserved

Landscape sketch showing a view of the sun setting over Mt. Desert Island in Maine, looking west over Eagle Lake from the summit of Cadillac Mountain. The immediate foreground includes the nearby rocky and wooded slope, loosely rendered, with a barren tree at left, which descends to Eagle Lake, prominently featured at lower center. Bounded on all sides by heavily wooded hills and mountains, the lake brightly reflects the sun's light, which also casts a shadow of the nearby ridge on the lake's surface.

In the middle distance at left, a round prominence--possibly Connor's Nubble--abruptly rises behind the lake. A rolling landscape interspersed with numerous reflective lakes extends from the middle distance into the background, where it forms an undulating horizon. Unobscured, the sun shines brightly at upper center, radiating beams of white light in every direction. The sky is a layered mix of sunset tones, with thin bands of pink clouds along the horizon, darker banks of puffy clouds at left and along the upper margin, and a hazy sky gradating from a warm peachy gold to a darker blue-green.

Verso: Landscape sketch showing a loosely rendered view of a low sun over an extremely mountainous landscape, with a tall, sharp prominence at far right, another craggy hill at lower center, and a rugged mountain range in the background that makes for a serrated horizon. Rolling, indistinct landscape extends from foreground to background.