1. Creatively, twilight is a mysterious time, when passions become stronger or enable a moment of disguise.

2. David Cox, Darley Churchyard, 1858 Worcester City museum collection

3. James Whistler, an American artist and author, argued that the artist was more powerful than nature in his Ten O’Clock lecture on 20 February 1885 at the Prince's Hall Piccadilly, London:

4. James Abbott McNeill Whistler Nocturne: Blue and Silver - Chelsea, 1871 Tate Gallery go to painting details and imagego to painting details and image

5. “... when the evening mist clothes the riverside with poetry, as with a veil, and the poor buildings lose themselves in the dim sky,”

6. Vincent Van Gogh Coal Barges, 1888 Museo Thyssen Bornemisza go to painting details and imagego to painting details and image

7. “... and the tall chimneys become campanili, and the warehouses are palaces in the night, and the whole city hangs in the heavens, and fairy-land is before us –“

8. Egon Schiele Sinking Sun, 1913 Leopold Museum go to painting details and imagego to painting details and image

9. “... the wise man and the one of pleasure, the working man and the cultured one, cease to understand, as they have ceased to see,”

10. Edward Hopper Gas, 1940 MoMA go to painting details and imagego to painting details and image

11. “... and Nature, who for once has sung in tune, sings her exquisite song to the artist alone.”

12. Wolfgang Tillmans I Don’t Want to Get Over You, 2000 Editions in the Tate and the Metropolitan Museum of Art go to photograph details and image

13. In Cox’s watercolour, the gravedigger works in the gloaming. Does the twilight speak of a journey between this world and the next? Or is Cox using the darkness to paint a story about the man himself? What do you think?

14. David Cox, Darley Churchyard, 1858 Worcester City museum collection

15. This watercolour of Darley Churchyard was one of David Cox’s last paintings and the one he considered his best. Born in Birmingham, Cox (1783-1859) was a master of the watercolour medium and is considered second only to Constable as a portrayer of the British landscape and weather. The images linked to in this slideshow are for personal research use only. For reproduction enquiries refer to the appropriate collection or contact museumcollections@worcestershire.gov.uk for advice.