Moonlight

Ralph Albert Blakelock's Moonlight (1888) is characteristic of the American painter's most celebrated and distinctive subjects: nocturnal landscapes in which a golden moon gleams through silhouetted trees over dark water. Blakelock occupied a peculiar position in American painting — largely self-taught, working outside the academic institutions and European-trained circles that defined American art in the Gilded Age, producing work of genuine lyric power that was systematically undervalued during his lifetime. He was eventually committed to an insane asylum in 1899, by which time his moonlight landscapes had become enormously commercially popular — a tragic irony he never benefited from.

Blakelock achieves his moonlight effect through a distinctive technique: very dark grounds over which he builds his compositions in thin, layered glazes, finally placing the moon's light through a process of scraping or wiping that reveals the luminous underpainting. The silhouetted tree forms are painted as simplified dark masses, their edges jagged against the glowing sky. His palette is extremely restricted — near-black for trees and foreground, gold and warm white for the moon and its reflections, deep blue-grey for sky and water. The overall effect is haunting and distinctive.