He appropriated the musical term “nocturne’ to describe his spare, murky depictions of nighttime along the Thames and in Venice. Whistler, more than any other nineteenth century artist, reinvigorated the depiction of moonlit nights into a modern idiom. Perhaps one of its best known proponents was James Abbott McNeil Whistler (1834-1903), an expatriate American artist living in London. By the 1860s the motif of the nocturne as a lyrical form of expression that conjured altered states of perception was widely embraced across all the arts. Within the next few decades literary circles in Paris embraced the nocturne, especially the Symbolist poets Rimbaud, Verlaine and Gautier. The term nocturne was first used to describe a series of musical compositions by Frederick Chopin in the 1820s. This Romantic impulse is still very much a part of the ethos of the contemporary nocturne. The restorative, calm works of the 18th century were replaced by paintings depicting mystery and the transformative quality of the moonlight to illuminate the metaphysical attributes of the landscapes, and to set up a correspondence between the moonlit landscape and the human mind. The nocturne motifs were used to convey mystery, drama and even a touch of the Sublime. The Romantic impulse in the art, literature and music of that time employed the nocturne as an emblem of the cultural shift from the 18th century Age of Enlightenment to the Romantic Age. This example by Claude Joesph Vernet, Night a Port in Moonlight (1772) is typical of 18th century moonlit landscapes using both the moon, reflection and another light source (the fire) to illuminate the scene.īut it was in the late 18th and early 19th century that the nocturne motif came into real popularity. This moon and water combination has become a common nocturne device and is still used in the 21st century. The moonlight was often augmented by another light source by a reflection of the moon on water. This was the Age of Enlightenment and moonlit landscapes were generally restorative and calm. The motif of the moonlit landscape has been a popular one since the late 18th century. As Thoreau said, “the night is a different country” and the shifts in perception that occur in a dimly lit landscape are inevitably influenced by the cultural ideas that surround the concept of night. Depictions of night time motifs tend to be as much about the ideas we have about the night as they are about what we actually see. Painting the moonlit landscape has challenged artists for centuries.
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