mething else is important beyond the house and the green hill.This painting appears to take place either at either dusk or dawn, when the sun is at the horizon. Likely it is dusk, as the setting appears to be in the Northern Hemisphere and the snow in the picture residing on the left hand side of fence would suggest it has yet to melt, so the sun would be setting in the west, or on the right. So the viewer, as well as the subject, is facing south. This affects the painting in several ways. The lighting is very dramatic, the middle ground being very much more lighted than the foreground and background, therefore the colors are more saturated than the foreground and background. Greens, browns and greys are used a lot in this piece and makes it very muddy. The house really does stand out against the painting because of the contrast of lighting. The piece is pretty balanced, it is more or less partitioned into four parts by the strong horizontal line in the middle and the road meeting with the edge of the forest vertically, the lighter areas in the top right and bottom left, the darker in the top left and bottom right areas of the painting.Lastly I think the frame of the work, it being a muted tint of yellowish green, added to the prevalence of the perception of the muddiness of the work. With a darker frame it may bring the highlights and color saturation from the lighting into more predominance....
