The Approaching of Evening

Oddie was among the earliest landscape painters in America. By 1832, he had already displayed his work at the National Academy of Design and was a regular exhibitor at the American Art Union in New York. Oddie traveled throughout the mid-Atlantic, painting the landscapes of Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Virginia. Often expressing the Romantic American landscape, Oddie enlists the cycle of life as well as nature’s grand harmony in his compositions. The artist was described as early as 1834 in William Dunlap’s History of the Rise and Progress of the Art of Design in the United States as “a lover of the Romantic…; and his themes were cottages and purling streams with some gentle swain and his true love strolling through the meadow, or seated beneath the shade of some wide-spreading tree.” Charles Lanman, writing in 1850 in “Our Landscape Painters,” said of Oddie:

He seems to have a passion for the thousand quiet nooks which are habitually visited by fishermen and boatmen of our tide-water rivers; and he portrays nature as she appears in her everyday garb, apparently forgetful of the sentiment and poetry which distinguishes certain hours of the day and seasons of the year.
      
While Cole magnified the awesome grandeur of nature, Oddie suggested the quiet, civilized beauty of rural America. The stillness in the landscape is demonstrated in this work, with its expansive sky and nearly motionless water surface.