California which is famous for nothing so much as its sunshine, has been depicted throughout the greater part of its history in terms of twilight, darkness and mute, somber atmosphere. Inness followed this tradition, but with a greater richness of painter-craft than most and with greater simplicity in composition. Inness liked big, bulky horizontal forms of hills and ranges, with a stripe of water at the bottom of the painting to emphasize its horizontality, like in this Sunset, 1865.