Evening, from the cycle Four different moments of the day

This cycle is one of Karel Postl's best-known works, painted under the influence of German and French idealizing and heroic Neo-Classicist landscape painting. Postl'simmediate model was Claude Lorrain, from whom he borrowed even his subject. Graphic reproductions of Lorrain's works, as also of paintings by contemporaneous Neo-Classicist painters, were easily available and very popular, especially views from the vicinity of Rome, of the city itself and of its architecture. In four canvases Postl evoked with colour, light and shade the early-morning atmosphere in the open air at sunrise, the scorching noon near Lago Albano with the Castel Gandolfo and the silhouette of Rome in the background, the evening with its long shadows in the countryside under the Vesuvius and, in the final nocturno, the same landscape in the brilliant light of the full moon.