Measured with instruments, moonlight is slightly redder than sunlight, yet the eye sees it as blue, and in the dark it loses color altogether, reds first. Painting the night means showing what people can barely see, on a canvas they will look at in a lit room. One painter here did it so well that visitors went behind the picture to look for a lamp.
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How These Were Chosen
Before streets were lit, a painter could hardly paint the night in front of the night: there was not enough light to tell one color from another on the palette. Night scenes were painted by day, in the studio, and to make the dark readable, painters brought a light into the picture itself: a torch, a fire, a lantern, the moon, or a holy figure who shines on his own.
In the nineteenth century, street lamps, shop windows and cafés filled the dark with small yellow and orange lights, and some painters went out to work on the spot, where the danger became mistaking one color for another.
Every picture chosen here shows something that could only happen, or only look this way, at night, and in each one the light can be traced to its source.
12. Frederic Remington, Fired On (1907)
Only one horse in this ambush is white, and the moon finds it first. Around it, the other horses rear and the men reach for their guns, fired on by an enemy outside the frame. Frederic Remington painted the scene in 1907, after years of drawing the American West in black and white for magazines.
Night, like color, came late to him. After seeing moonlit pictures by the Californian painter Charles Rollo Peters in New York in 1899, he painted more than seventy night scenes in a decade. Color was the hard part, and he complained that he had "worked too long in black and white."
In Fired On, the scene is set just before dawn, when the dark holds almost no color, and the moon picks out a single pale shape. A Brooklyn Eagle reviewer saw it at once: "a white horse in the foreground shows the only big light."
Then he turned on his past. In January 1908 he burned about thirty older canvases that he now counted as mere illustrations. That same year he wrote that he had finally found "how to do the silver sheen of moonlight."
At a Glance
Artist: Frederic Remington (1861 to 1909)
Painted: 1907
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 68.8 × 101.6 cm (27.1 × 40 in)
Where to see it: Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.
About This Painting
What is Frederic Remington's most famous painting?
No single title is agreed on. A Dash for the Timber, painted in 1889, and The Fall of the Cowboy are among his best known, and both belong to the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas.
11. Winslow Homer, Summer Night (1890)
Two young women dance together on a porch above a rocky shore, while a row of dark figures watches the Atlantic break white in the night. Winslow Homer painted Summer Night in 1890 at Prouts Neck, in Maine, where he had lived for seven years. The moon lights the whole scene, yet it is nowhere in the picture.