Marilynne Robinson has a great line in her novel Housekeeping: "She was an old woman but she managed to look like a young woman with a ravaging disease." I think that qualifies as damning with faint praise. Autumn, on the other hand, pulls it off with aplomb, making the lapse into dormancy, even death, look like a celebration.
The problem artists have is that when it's over, it's OVER. The world becomes muted and quiet very suddenly; it actually takes me a week or so to adjust my eyes when the spectacle ends. And then throwing that remembered brilliance of colour onto a canvas invariably looks phony and overdone. Most will tell you that autumn is by far the most difficult season to paint.
But we do it anyway.