How are we to describe selected paintings and artists concerned with the evening, along with small communities or sociocultural groups coming together in the twilight founded on apparently esoteric hunting beliefs? In the first sense, we might think of paintings such as Joy Garnett’s Crepuscular Dawn, Shade, or Beacon, or of our appreciation for an apparition of an unidentified terrain, such as Arbor. Here, the terminology of vespertine connotes an enthusiasm for, and insider knowledge of, certain paintings or painters of the stars and their motions, such as Shields, on the River Tyne by Joseph Mallord William Turner (1823) or Starry Night over the Rhone by Vincent van Gogh (1888). The paradox is that such paintings and painters can have a simultaneously wide and specialist appreciation, although sunset tends usually to designate that powerful and seemingly fragrant portion of the day. In practice, understanding sunset in this...

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