Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;

To bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees,

And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,

And still more, later flowers for the bees,

Until they think warm days will never cease,

For Summer has o'er-brimmed their clammy cell.

Does anyone remember Anne of Green Gables (movie, not book)? Well, it's irrelevant but Anne Shirley quotes this first line of Keats' "Ode to Autumn" to Diana and that's what came to mind when I saw this portrait. I picked Thomas Moran's Under Trees (The Autumnal Woods) because the colors are absolutely phenomenal. Fall is my favorite time of year. The short, crisp days are colored in gold, red, orange and yellow. The landscape looks like it's on fire. Which I guess would ultimately be a bad thing, but pretty nonetheless.

Another element I really liked is the feeling that the one human subject in the painting is completely engulfed in these flame-like surroundings. He seems to be wrapped in this autumnal cocoon and he doesn't look apt to abandon it anytime soon. He is content to simply enjoy his surroundings and think, and just be. He is revelling in the beauty of nature and is unattended with outside stresses. This goes along with what Ruskin says in an excerpt from Modern Painters that "if a person receiving even the noblest ideas of simple beauty be asked why he likes the object exciting them, he will not be able to give any distinct reason, nor to trace in his mind any formed thought." The subject couldn't care less as to why he is content in the safe haven nature has formed for him and honestly, I don't blame him.

This portrait epitomizes the peaceful relationship between an uncultivated natural surrounding and an appreciating patron that finds awe within the colors and setting which goes along with the whole idea of romanticism and the wonder that can be found in nature. Thomas Moran's work shows not only a harmonious relationship with nature but also the safety one can feel when enveloped in all it's splendor. (Sorry-totally cheesy and cliche, but still relevant) Ruskin also writes "But although everything in nature is more or less beautiful, every species of object has its own kind and degree of beauty; some being in their own nature more beautiful than others, and few, if any, individuals possessing the utmost degree of beauty of which the species is capable. This utmost degree of specific beauty, necessarily coexistent with the utmost perfection of the object in other respects, is the ideal of the object." I can't imagine any other place as peaceful and beautiful as where this lucky guy is and this would be my "ideal" destination.