The golden hour

The awakening majesty of the early dawn. The resplendent glory of the dusk. Twice per day, the sky is suffused with golden light, bringing an essence of regal wonder and timeless beauty to each and every thing that it touches. Shadows lengthen, colours deepen, and reflections on water shimmer with a striking and luxuriant glow. The golden hour, as this ephemeral period of twilight beauty is known, is perhaps the most evocative of regularly-occurring natural phenomena, providing inspiration to artists across the ages.

As the warmth and splendour of the golden hour falls, this trick of the light speaks to our cultural and innate adoration of gold in all its forms, and calls out to our attraction towards this most paradisiacal of colours. Gold is precious, a rare element which serves as an unmissable signifier of nature’s beauty, with the potential to enhance its surroundings in myriad ways.

As befits the often unpredictable behaviour of natural phenomena, the golden hour can fall for a fleeting few minutes, or can stretch out beautifully for well over an hour. However, no matter how long it lasts, this period of warm and fiery light never fails to ignite the imagination and bring a unique sense of tranquillity and calm. The golden glow is brought about via a process of light dispersion and refraction, with the blue light of the sun being scattered through our atmosphere as the sunlight moves closer to the Earth. This dispersion of blue light, and the slowing effect our atmospheric conditions create, results in a warm, visually dimensional radiance, deepening the beauty of the natural world, highlighting the skin, and rendering all it touches with a gilded flourish.

It should come as no surprise to discover evidence of the golden hour’s influence throughout the canon of art history, as the world’s greatest artistic minds have been captivated by the impact and beauty of gold since time immemorial. The earliest, and perhaps most visually impactive presence of the golden hour can be seen in the figurative paintings of Renaissance masters, with Caravaggio’s dramatic portraits bathed in beautifying golden light, at once a natural phenomena and an expression of the metaphysical. The artists of the Baroque period, likewise, were transfixed by the power of golden light upon human subjects, and Velazquez and Rembrandt made gold-hued portraiture a defining aspect of their signature painting style.

However, it was with the emergence of plein air painting, and the skyscapes and pastoral images of the late 18th and 19th centuries, when the golden hour as a landscape motif truly came to the fore. JMW Turner, with his awe-inspiring and filmic scenes of vast horizons, deep valleys, and stormy seas truly understood the beauty of glowing gold, capturing it time after time on his celebrated naturalist canvases. John Constable, another esteemed British artist, depicted idyllic English pastoral scenes often highlighted by the unique radiance of the golden hour, masterfully expressing the effect of the long shadows and the depth of colour this transient moment brings forth as its essence.

Perhaps part of the endless appeal of the golden hour is its timeless quality which unfailingly evokes a deeply emotional response. The golden hour puts the unfettered glory of gold within reach of all, translating the warmth of pure sunlight into the emotional warmth of a moment in time, an adoration of natural beauty and its impact upon our senses.

La Prairie