CROQUET GALLERY:  Twilight (The Croquet Game)

1892 oil on canvas

It is from corner to corner the keen half light of dusk time and everything the picture holds it holds in the integrity of this light. Occupying the front from left to right for two-thirds of its sixty-three and a half inch width are five figures -- two men, two women, and a dog -- variously engaged in a game of croquet while in the upper right five young women a little less than half the height of the women in the front appear to be dancing or playing a game of tag or blind man's bluff. At the top left a branch of light green foliage overhangs the croquet party, paralleled at the bottom by two large greenish-brown bushes, separated by a strip of grass which continues beyond the second central bush to fill the picture's space to its right border and up two-thirds of its fifty and three-quarter inch height. The croquet party occupies the space between branch and bushes against a dark green and brown background -- suggesting thickly growing trees and shrubs -- which in its full extension from edge to edge rises just beyond the croquet party and flows into the upper right corner for the remaining one-third of the picture's height thus forming where it meets the grass a short horizontal line that bisects the dancing figures approximately at the waist. Parallel to this line just below the dancing figures a dark green brown speckled leafy branch reaches into the picture out of its right side. Directly above the dancers near the right top corner are three irregular yellow-orange shapes that denote gaps in the heavy foliature in which the waning light of day's end glows.