Moon

Moon is a subject in art. The gallery holds 121 works in this subject in art, including works by Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Chambers and William Trost Richards.

The moon is among the oldest and most enduring subjects in art, charged from antiquity with mythological and symbolic meaning. In the Greco-Roman world it was personified as a goddess—Selene to the Greeks, Luna to the Romans, often shown with a crescent headdress driving her chariot across the night sky—and identified with the virgin huntress Artemis, or Diana, so that the moon came to signify chastity, change, and the passage of time. In Islamic art the crescent became a sign of divine order and guidance, adorning domes and banners, while in East Asian ink painting the moon, paired with water or mountains, evoked stillness and contemplative harmony.

As an observed natural phenomenon rather than a mere emblem, the moon flourished in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic, where Aert van der Neer specialized in moonlit river scenes whose silver light catches clouds and rippling water. The theme reached its philosophical height with German Romanticism. Caspar David Friedrich, who was nearly obsessed with capturing moonlight, made the motif an object of pious contemplation: in his "Two Men Contemplating the Moon" (first version 1819–20, Galerie Neue Meister, Dresden; the Metropolitan's version ca. 1825–30), two figures seen from behind—the rückenfigur device—stand before a gnarled oak and rising moon, identified as the artist and his disciple August Heinrich (1794–1822).

Visually the genre is defined by tonal restraint: a limited palette of blues, greys, and silvered greens, dramatic contrasts of dark land against luminous sky, and a single concentrated light source. These qualities made moonlight a natural vehicle for mood. In Victorian Britain, Atkinson Grimshaw rendered moonlit docks and lanes with near-photographic precision, while in America the theme fed Tonalism. Ralph Albert Blakelock (1847–1919) transformed dreamlike nocturnes—his scumbled, scraped, lacquer-like surfaces in works such as "Moonlight"—into proto-modernist exercises in pattern and abstraction; one of his moonlights sold for the highest price then paid for a living American artist.

The moon's pull extended across genres held in this collection: the perilous night of Thomas Chambers's "Storm-Tossed Frigate," the luminist calm of Martin Johnson Heade's "Point Judith, Rhode Island," the fiery moonlit spectacle of Albert Bierstadt's "Mount Vesuvius at Midnight," and the memento mori of Hans Baldung Grien's "The Ages and Death." Alongside Whistler's Nocturnes and Tsukioka Yoshitoshi's print series "One Hundred Aspects of the Moon," these works trace a lineage that links Romantic landscape, Tonalism, and the threshold of modern abstraction.