Clair de Lune: September 2022

Friday, September 9, 2022

Winslow Homer (1836 - 1910) - Eastern Point Light, 1880

Winslow Homer (1836 - 1910) - Eastern Point Light, 1880
Watercolor over graphite, 24.6 x 34.1 cm
Princeton University Art Museum

Eastern Point Light belongs to an extraordinary series of bold and experimental watercolors painted by Homer on Ten Pound Island, off Gloucester, Massachusetts, during the summer of 1880. These works show Homer pushing himself to achieve an unprecedented expressiveness, occasionally verging on abstraction. This moonlit seascape stands out from the numerous brilliantly colored sunset scenes in the series with its monochromatic palette of blues and blacks set off by whites. For these, Homer employed various techniques, including dragging a relatively dry brush quickly across the sheet to allow the plain surface to show through. In the area of the water there is evidence that Homer used the end of his brush to gouge out some of the wet pigment to capture the dappled light, while the circle of the full moon appears to have been scraped out. Soon after completing this masterful watercolor, Homer traveled to the northeast coast of England where he spent almost two years depicting the sea, which became the dominant theme of his later work. Via

William Pether (1731-1819) - Moonlit River Scene with a Ruined Gothic Church, and a Stone Bridge with an Angler

William Pether - Moonlit River Scene with a Ruined Gothic Church, and a Stone Bridge with an Angler
oil on canvas, 60.9 x 73.2 cm
National Trust

Ohara Koson - Three Plovers and Crescent Moon, 1926

William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825 - 1905) - Evening Mood, 1882

William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825 - 1905) -Evening Mood, 1882
oil on canvas, 207,5 x 108 cm
National Museum of Fine Arts of Cuba

William Keith (1838 - 1911) - Oaks by Moonlight

William Keith - Oaks by Moonlight
oil on canvas, 58.5 by 71.1 cm
Sotheby's

Joseph Wright of Derby (1734–1797) - William and Margaret from Percy's ‘Reliques of Ancient English Poetry', ca 1785

Joseph Wright of Derby (1734–1797) - William and Margaret from Percy's ‘Reliques of Ancient English Poetry', ca 1785
oil on cavas, 121.9 x 139.7 cm
Yale Center for British Art

This painting represents the devastation wrought by the fickleness of youthful love. William, the man in bed, had given his lover Margaret cause to think they would marry, but the very next day she saw him marry another. She promptly died of grief. On William’s wedding night, Margaret appeared to him in a dream at the foot of his bed. She was dressed in her winding sheet (or burial cloth) to announce her death. William hastened to confirm his dream the next morning and, finding Margaret dead, died the same day stricken with remorse. The tragic story comes from an ancient poem published in Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1766). As the poem says: “Fair Margaret dyed for pure true love, / Sweet William dyed for sorrow.”

Walter Crane - La belle dame sans merci, 1865

Walter Crane - La belle dame sans merci, 1865
Private collection

La Belle Dame sans Merci: A Ballad
John Keats

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
So haggard and so woe-begone?
The squirrel’s granary is full,
And the harvest’s done.

I see a lily on thy brow,
With anguish moist and fever-dew,
And on thy cheeks a fading rose
Fast withereth too.

I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful—a faery’s child,
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.

I made a garland for her head,
And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;
She looked at me as she did love,
And made sweet moan

I set her on my pacing steed,
And nothing else saw all day long,
For sidelong would she bend, and sing
A faery’s song.

She found me roots of relish sweet,
And honey wild, and manna-dew,
And sure in language strange she said—
‘I love thee true’.

She took me to her Elfin grot,
And there she wept and sighed full sore,
And there I shut her wild wild eyes
With kisses four.

And there she lullèd me asleep,
And there I dreamed—Ah! woe betide!—
The latest dream I ever dreamt
On the cold hill side.

I saw pale kings and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
They cried—‘La Belle Dame sans Merci
Thee hath in thrall!’

I saw their starved lips in the gloam,
With horrid warning gapèd wide,
And I awoke and found me here,
On the cold hill’s side.

And this is why I sojourn here,
Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.

Pierre-Jacques Volaire (1729 – 1790) - The Eruption of Vesuvius, 1771

Pierre-Jacques Volaire (1729 – 1790) - The Eruption of Vesuvius, 1771
oil on canvas, 116.8 × 242.9 cm
The Art Institute of Chicago

In this imposing composition, molten lava spews from the mouth of Mount Vesuvius in Italy and winds down the hillside towards the Bay of Naples. Energetic human figures observe the spectacle, their small scale emphasizing the volcano’s enormity. Vesuvius erupted six times between 1707 and 1794 and thus became a touchstone of popular culture at the time. This same period saw the first systematic excavations of Pompeii, the ancient city that Vesuvius famously destroyed in 79 CE. The romance of Vesuvius simultaneously wondrous and terrifying, ancient and contemporary—made it a frequent subject in 18th-century European art and literature. Paintings like this had enormous appeal in tourist markets.

Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890) - Evening Landscape with Rising Moon, 1889

Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890) - Evening Landscape with Rising Moon, 1889
oil on canvas, 92 x 72 cm
Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands

The moon, the sun and the stars were important symbolic elements for Van Gogh who equated their radiating light to religious precepts surrounding the resurrection, redemption and salvation. In this painting the moon in brilliant yellow rises from behind the smoky blue Alpilles mountains, and radiates a light that he has evoked through multiple short strokes of white paint. His use of these short, regular, white strokes was fairly unusual for him, but gives the effect of the dappled moonlight playing across the landscape.

There is great rhythm in this painting that is created through these very precise brushstrokes - every stroke of paint here has a function and builds towards the greater surface pattern across the canvas. His forms are very rounded from the stacks of wheat to the mountains, and this sense of 'roundness' and curvature was something that was characteristic of many of his later works. This painting was done in July 1889, which was when he made his first trip back to Arles from the asylum, and subsequently had his first serious breakdown in Saint-Remy. Via

Ma Yuan - Viewing plum blossoms by moonlight, early 13th century

Ma Yuan - Viewing plum blossoms by moonlight, early 13th century
Fan mounted as an album leaf; ink and color on silk
25.1 × 26.7 cm
The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Crafted as carefully as the regulated verse of a Tang dynasty quatrain, Ma Yuan's Viewing Plum Blossoms by Moonlight is a visual poem evoking a complex sense of time, place, and mood. The browns and blacks in the trees and rocks contrast with the light grayish hues of the cliff and mountain to suggest the mist-filled, moonlit atmosphere of an early spring evening. The thatch roof of a pavilion identifies the place as a garden setting. The white-robed gentleman, framed by the dark angular forms of the landscape, perfectly counterbalances the moon in its setting of limitless space. Recalling a yin-yang cosmic diagram with its implication of positive within negative, light within dark, solid within void, the painting may be read as an emblem of man's dual nature: tied to the physical world, man's spirit is not contained by it but, like the plum, reaches upward to partake of the infinite.

Clair de Lune