Clair de Lune: August 2023

Eilif Peterssen - Summer Night, 1886

Eilif Peterssen - Summer Night, 1886
oil on canvas, 151 x 133 cm
The National Museum, Oslo

Edmund Dulac - Stories from the Arabian nights, The magic horse returns with prince,1907

Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovsky - Moonlight, 1899

Suzuki Kiitsu - Moon and Waves, first half 19th century

Suzuki Kiitsu - Moon and Waves, first half 19th century
ink and color on silk, 50 1/8 × 21 3/4 in. (127.32 × 55.25 cm)
Minneapolis Institute of Art

Kiitsu, from a family of dyers, had been adopted into the family of Suzuki Reitan (1782–1817), one of Sakai Hōitsu’s students. Kiitsu began to study under Hōitsu in 1813 and served him until his death in 1828. He eventually became head of the family after marrying Reitan’s sister. While his predecessors followed a rather formalized style, Kiitsu created tension in his works by playing with the contrast between flat, decorative shapes and naturalistic depictions. via

Frederik Marinus Kruseman - Monk Meditating near a Ruin by Moonlight, 1862

Frederik Marinus Kruseman - Monk Meditating near a Ruin by Moonlight, 1862
oil on canvas, 78 cm (30.7 in) x 64 cm (25.1 in)
Rijksmuseum

In the right foreground of this nocturnal scene a monk meditates near an overgrown ruin. This is the abbey in Villers-la-Ville near Brussels, the city where the painter lived for a while. The subject and the frame embellished with sheaves of wheat were inspired by the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich’s famous Tetschen Altarpiece depicting a cross atop a mountain. via

Louis Douzette - Nächtliche Entenjagd am Bodden (Nocturnal duck hunting on the Bodden), 1918

Louis Douzette - Nächtliche Entenjagd am Bodden (Nocturnal duck hunting on the Bodden), 1918
oil on canvas, 53,5 x 79,5 cm
Private collection

Lev Lagorio - Moonlight on the Neva, 1898

Lev Lagorio - Moonlight on the Neva, 1898
Primorye Regional Art Gallery

Joseph Rebell - Leuchtturm im Hafen von Neapel bei Mondschein, 1827

Joseph Rebell - Leuchtturm im Hafen von Neapel bei Mondschein, 1827
oil on canvas, 21.5 cm (8.4 in) x 23.5 cm (9.2 in)
Belveldere Gallery, Austria

Bartholomeus van Hove - Dutch Town by Moonlight, circa 1826

Bartholomeus van Hove - Dutch Town by Moonlight, circa 1826
oil on canvas, 39.9 cm (15.7 in) x 50.6 cm (19.9 in)
Museum of Fine Arts Ghent (MSK)

Johan Christian Dahl - Copenhagen Harbor by Moonlight, 1846

Johan Christian Dahl - Copenhagen Harbor by Moonlight, 1846
oil on canvas, 37 3/4 x 60 5/8 in. (95.9 x 154 cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Since the early nineteenth-century, the waterfront ship and lumber yard depicted in this view has been known as Larsens Plads, or Larsen’s Place, after its founder, Lars Larsen. Dahl first painted this prospect in 1816 (Kurpfälzisches Museum, Heidelberg), but in reprising it for the present work he doubled the size of the canvas, omitting incidental details and heightening its atmospheric effect. This placid scene, conceived as the pendant to a far wilder, natural one, Tyrolean Landscape with a Waterfall (1823; private collection), remained unsold at the artist’s death. via

Johan Barthold Jongkind - Clair De Lune Sur Un Canal, Dordrecht, 1876

Johan Barthold Jongkind - Clair De Lune Sur Un Canal, Dordrecht, 1876
oil on canvas, 39 x 47 cm. (15.4 x 18.5 in.)

Caspar David Friedrich - Abbey among Oak Trees, 1809-1810

Caspar David Friedrich - Abbey among Oak Trees, 1809-1810
oil on canvas, 171.0 x 110.4 cm
Alte Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Abbey among Oak Trees is the companion piece to Monk by the Sea. Friedrich showed both paintings in the Berlin Academy Exhibition of 1810. At the request of the 15-year-old crown prince, they were bought by King Friedrich Wilhelm III. In their perplexing remoteness and formal radicalism they were to become key works in German Romanticism. In Monk by the Sea a human being stands lost in the apocalyptic loneliness and infinity of nature and the cosmos. He meditates on life and its boundaries. In the companion piece, the gates of death have opened. Monks carry a coffin into a deserted Gothic ruin to hold a requiem mass under the cross. The graveyard with its crooked, sunken tombstones is equally deserted. Bare oaks reach up into the sky as though in complaint. The first light of dawn is appearing over the horizon like an ocher-yellow veil, outshining the tender curve of the crescent moon. The visionary gleam of the heavenly realm is completely detached from the earthly regions, which are still sunk in darkness. One sign of hope is in the two single lights on the crucifix. For the painter Carl Gustav Carus, who was also a friend of Friedrich’s, this painting was “of all recent landscapes, possibly the most deeply poetic work of art.” via