Left: Emmet Gowin (American, b. 1941), Scarperia, Italy, 1973. Gelatin silver print. Collection of Emmet and Edith Gowin
Right: Samuel Palmer (British, 1805-1881), The End of the Day: A Recollection of Italy, early 1870s. Watercolor, gouache, touches of gum Arabic, and traces of graphite. Purchased on the Sunny Crawford Von Bülow Fund, 1978, 2009.393
Gowin identifies with Samuel Palmer’s intense mythical vision in The End of the Day: A Recollection of Italy. The watercolor is not a record of geographic facts but a composite of observations, imagined places, and the work of artists who inspired Palmer. In 1973, as Gowin began to travel extensively, environmental concerns entered his perspective on landscape. If he wanted to portray the people he cared about, he realized, “I couldn’t think about them in an isolated way; they always had to be somewhere.”