Twelve paintings make a building feel haunted without showing a single ghost. They run from a ruined abbey that Caspar David Friedrich began in 1809 to a lit window that René Magritte finished in 1954.
The strangeness often comes from something the painter took away, a table painted out or a statue lifted off its base. One real ruin was even remodeled, years later, to look more like its painting.
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How These Were Chosen
A house is the most familiar thing a picture can show. Because everyone knows what a lived in house looks like, one dark window or one missing person is enough to make it strange.
The unease comes from what the painter took out or set wrong: an empty room, a window lit at the wrong hour, a corridor that runs too far, figures dwarfed by the walls.
Six of the places really stood, from a small town in Bohemia to an abbey near the Baltic. In most of them the painter changed something before showing it, and that change is what makes the place uneasy.
12. René Magritte, The Empire of Light (1953 to 1954)
Above a small pale house in René Magritte's The Empire of Light, the sky is full of fat white clouds in broad daylight. Below it, the street has already gone dark, and one window of the house glows yellow.
A painted evening normally moves from day to night by degrees, through dusk. Magritte cuts out that stage: the street, the house and a tall dark tree have reached night while the sky above them is still in full sun. A glance outside to guess the hour gives two answers from the same view.
The Belgian painter returned to this split between day and night many times over his career, and he painted this version in 1953 and 1954.
In it, the yellow window is the one sign of a household settled in for the evening. Here the evening exists only at ground level, and daylight brings the unease that usually belongs to the dark.
The shape of the canvas adds to that reversal. Magritte chose an upright format almost two meters high, and the sky takes most of that height, so the daylight pushes the night down to the bottom of the picture.
At a Glance
Artist: René Magritte (1898 to 1967)
Painted: 1953 to 1954
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 195.4 × 131.2 cm (77 × 51.6 in)
Where to see it: Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice
11. Andrew Wyeth, Wind from the Sea (1947)
Through an open window in Andrew Wyeth's Wind from the Sea, a sheer lace curtain billows into a room. The viewer stands inside, facing that window, and its frame is all the picture shows of the house.
The American painter finished the picture in 1947. Before he did, he stopped to write himself a note about one thing in that room.