Painting the moon: night scenes from Grimshaw to Munch

Moonlight is a difficult thing to paint. It flattens colour, hides detail and turns familiar places strange, and yet artists have returned to it again and again. The works gathered here come from very different traditions: a self-taught English painter, a French artist painting his own garden, Japanese printmakers working in series, an American teacher who thought pictures should behave like music, and a Norwegian painter who used the night to describe a state of mind.

The painter of moonlight

John Atkinson Grimshaw has been hailed as "the painter of moonlight", and Lane Scene at Night (1872) shows why. The moon itself is just out of view, yet it floods the scene through tangles of dark, crooked branches and casts deep shadows across the ground. Those shadows crisscross the tracks pressed into the damp earth by wagon wheels. The light is not silver but a strikingly eerie, bright green.

In the middle distance a single cart makes its way down the muddy road. The Art Institute of Chicago describes this as an echo of a Romantic favourite, the lone traveller. Grimshaw arrived at this kind of picture by an unusual route: he was self-taught, and began to paint in the 1850s while working as a clerk at the Great Northern Railway company in Leeds, England.

Linen in the moonlight

Maurice Denis takes us somewhere far quieter. Drying the Linen, or Moonrise at the Priory (1894) shows the enclosed back garden of a former priory, a building where monks and nuns once lived under the leadership of a prior. Denis bought the building in 1914, turned it into a home for his large family and lived there for the last thirty years of his life.

Nothing dramatic happens here. A woman dressed in black hangs linens to dry so that, according to custom, they will be bleached by moonlight. The full moon casts a golden glow over the whole nighttime scene.

Snow, moon and flowers

In Japan the moon belonged to a long poetic tradition. Late in his career Utagawa Hiroshige explored the theme of setsugekka, "snow, moon, and flowers", in a set of three triptychs. Full Moon on Kanazawa, Musashi (1857) is the moon of that set: a panoramic view of the autumn moon over Kanazawa, near Tokyo.

The Cleveland Museum of Art notes that Hiroshige's contemporaries would have recognised the place at once: the coastline dotted with villages, the fishing boats, and the distinctive double-arched bridge at the bottom right. The moon here is not a source of mystery but a seasonal marker, part of a view people knew.

The same seasonal language appears in Totoya Hokkei's Landscape with Ferry Boat, Geese and Full Moon (early 1830s). Men in boats gather reeds on a lake while geese fly across the moonlit sky, and the museum reads the scene simply: autumn is in the air.

A moon that cannot be reached

Some moons carry a lesson. In Kanō Tan'yū's Gibbons Reaching for the Moon (1600s), long-armed gibbons form a chain hanging down from a tree, hoping to touch what they believe is the moon. The orb that stays beyond their grasp is only the full moon's reflection on the still surface of a pond or lake.

The image is a common metaphor for the deluded mind in Buddhist thought. There is a further twist: gibbons do not live in Japan. Japanese painters of the premodern era knew them through paintings brought from China, so the animals themselves arrived as images before they became symbols.

Kawanabe Kyōsai's Full Moon with Crow on Plum Branch (1880s) pairs its image with a poem. In the museum's translation, the plum keeps company with the crows' "squawking forms", its fragrance "assaults their feathers", and "beautiful shadows of the branches in the moonlight climb toward the study curtain". The pair of crows that have lodged in the house cry and make to fly away "under the bright moon in the depths of the night".

Pictures as music

Arthur Wesley Dow's Moonrise (c. 1915) comes from an artist better known in his time as a teacher. Dow set out his ideas in Composition: A Series of Exercises in Art Structure for the Use of Students and Teachers (1899). His approach was rooted in the belief that music was "the key to the other fine arts, since its essence is pure beauty", and that modern art should aspire to be "visual music".

Night as a state of mind

Edvard Munch's Evening, Melancholy I (1896) is set on the shore at Åsgårdstrand, a fishing village south of Oslo. The figure is Munch's friend, the art critic Jappe Nilssen, whom the museum describes as jilted and tormented. Here evening is no longer a time of day but a feeling.

Munch built that feeling into the making of the print. He chose heavily grained blocks of wood so that the pattern of the board would add texture, and carved the blocks crudely to make the most of the handmade technique. He also experimented so that each impression is unique, printing black ink from the woodblock and colouring the sheet extensively with watercolour and gouache. The Cleveland Museum of Art calls it an example of how method can reinforce meaning: the simplified shapes, the flattened space and the dark hues correspond to the figure's deep depression.

Moonlight and imagination

Not every night scene is meant to be read clearly. Queen Mab's Cave is a reduced copy, made after 1846, of a painting J. M. W. Turner first exhibited at the British Institution that year. The original passed with the rest of Turner's immense bequest to the nation into the National Gallery and, in 1954, the Tate Gallery.

When the painting was shown, lines from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and from Turner's own manuscript poem "Fallacies of Hope" were added to the title in the catalogue. According to the museum they did little to explain what it calls the nearly unintelligible mixture of fairies and Welsh ruins in the composition, and copies by anonymous artists are abundant.