Moonlight is too faint to paint by, so most night scenes in art were made indoors, by day, from memory. Yet some of these moons hold more than atmosphere. An astronomer once claimed he could date one of them to a single night of the eighteenth century, from the odd shape of its lit edge.
Cool Stories About Art is a newsletter to learn art the fun way.
Join 200,000+ readers and get:
10 new art stories / month
The entire archive of content (1,000+ articles)
Comment, ask questions, and chat with other readers
The moon is a light that can sit inside the picture. A small pale disk is enough to light a whole landscape, so that one shape sets how bright everything else may be, from a lit window on a riverbank to the glow of a volcano.
In most of the paintings here, the moon itself is tiny, sometimes a dot near the edge or a reflection in a pane of glass. What matters is the work it does: setting the light for the whole scene, or carrying part of the story.
That was the rule of choice. A moonlit picture made the list only if its moon could not be painted out without changing what the picture says. The twelve span nearly seven centuries, from a Chinese silk fan to a Paris canvas.
12. Ma Yuan, Viewing Plum Blossoms by Moonlight (early 13th century)
A small pale moon floats in the empty silk on the right of Viewing Plum Blossoms by Moonlight. From the left, a crooked plum tree reaches toward it, and below the branches a scholar in a white robe sits on a ledge while an attendant stands behind him holding a long bundle.
The picture was made in the early 1200s at the Southern Song court in Hangzhou, on a round silk fan barely 27 centimeters across. Its painter, Ma Yuan, liked to crowd everything solid into one corner, and here the cliff, the rocks, the tree and the two men all sit in the lower left, a habit that earned him the nickname One Corner Ma.
That leaves most of the fan empty, with the moon alone in it. For Ma Yuan's first viewers, the moon and the plum also came as a pair. Plum trees flower at the end of winter, on bare branches, before a single leaf appears, and Song poets tied that early blossom to the night sky.
The pairing went back to Lin Bu, a poet who lived as a hermit among his plum trees two centuries before Ma Yuan. In his best-known couplet, sparse plum shadows slant over clear, shallow water, and a hidden scent drifts under a dim yellow moon.
With those lines in the air, Ma Yuan needed very little moon. His is barely larger than the scholar's head, set near the edge of the fan, and it is enough to turn the whole scene into night.
At a Glance
Artist: Ma Yuan (active about 1190 to 1225)
Painted: Early 13th century, Southern Song dynasty
Medium: Ink and color on silk, a round fan mounted as an album leaf
Size: 25.1 × 26.7 cm (9.9 × 10.5 in)
Where to see it: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
About This Painting
What do plum blossoms symbolize in Chinese culture?
Endurance and renewal. Because the tree blooms in the cold, sometimes with snow still on the branches, it came to stand for integrity under hardship. Chinese painters grouped it with the pine and the bamboo as the Three Friends of Winter, plants that stay alive through the harshest season.
11. Albert Pinkham Ryder, Moonlight Marine (1870 to 1890)
Two dark sails ride a black sea under a moon half buried in cloud in Moonlight Marine, a wooden panel about the size of a record sleeve. Cracks run across its whole surface, straight through the moon, and the clouds, the sails and the hull no longer sit where the painter left them.