Winter Twilight

King specialized in animal, landscape, and still-life paintings. She was active in Cleveland in the late 19th century and taught at Baldwin University in Berea, Ohio (now Baldwin Wallace University). The concentrated glow on the horizon and the faint carriage-wheel tracks in the snow evoke Northeast Ohio’s wintry cloud cover and agrarian history. This canvas was one of several thousand given to Oberlin by the Cleveland educator Charles Olney the year before the Allen was founded, forming the foundation of the museum’s collection. It hung in the Carnegie Library until 1977, and briefly in the College president’s house, but was not installed here in the museum’s galleries prior to this display, beginning in 2023.