Gericault completed Evening during the summer of 1818. This painting is one of the four landscapes painted to portray different times of day.

It highlights the ruins of an aqueduct in the Italian countryside, which Gericault visited in 1817. During his visit to this site, the weather started to become turbulent and sun started to disappear as pitch black clouds invaded the sky. This scenery was quite fitting for the personal turmoil that Gericault had at that time, as he had fathered the son of his uncle’s second wife.

However, Gericault saw this as a sublime scene of beauty and action, which he felt compelled to paint rather than wallow in. Despite his short life of 32 years, it was with this stormy aesthetic that Gericault fathered the styles of emerging Romanticism.

Some critics say that the painting is unusually large for a landscape from that era, and depicting an ambiguous scene, cast in slanting light, of swimmers bathing near a hill town. However, many argue that like other Gericault paintings, Evening is energetic and brilliantly colored.

Unfortunately, Gericault was able to only finish two out of the remaining three landscape paintings (Morning: Landscape with Fishermen and Noon: Landscape with a Roman Tomb) due to the family conflict with his illegitimate son.