#night

Apparently a wealthy backer had been funding his trips east for years — it started with a magazine job illustrating the Holy Land — and Morocco kept turning up in his paintings long after. They say he did a whole run of these night scenes there.

Part of a long series he kept adding to and rehanging for years — love, jealousy, illness, death, all of it as one run. Supposedly this one went under a second title along the lines of 'After the Fall', which tells you roughly where in that story we've arrived.

Reviewers gave it a kicking when it first went on show, until Ruskin wrote to The Times to spell out what all the overgrown weeds and the handle-less door were meant to mean — after that it caught on enormously, and he painted later versions that were sent round the world. He's said to have done the night parts outdoors in an orchard, sitting out through winter to get the light right.

This shows Czech Legion troops marching into Vladivostok in 1918, deep in the chaos of the Russian Civil War. Luks was usually known for gritty city scenes, not history painting on this scale.

Apparently this is a small preparatory sketch for a bigger, finished painting - the kind of quick study made to work out a mood before committing to the real canvas. I couldn't track down much more about it.

He was living in an asylum in the south of France when he made this, and it's roughly the view out of his bedroom window before dawn, with a village added that wasn't actually there. According to Wikipedia he didn't rate it much himself — in his letters he wrote it off as a failure.

According to Wikipedia, the glowing building here is a real house that belonged to a woman named Florence Griswold. It's a museum today, but back then it was just where traveling painters crashed for the summer.

He was a toll clerk who painted on his days off, and the critics of his day mostly treated him as a joke. From what I've read he tried to sell this one to the mayor of his home town, who wasn't interested, and it then dropped out of sight for years before a dealer turned it up again in the 1920s.

It's watercolour on paper rather than a painting in oils, which explains how thin it all looks. He earned his living engraving other people's designs and sold almost nothing of his own while he was alive. The scene's out of A Midsummer Night's Dream, from what I can tell.

He was on a run of night pictures around this time, and wrote to his brother about wanting to do darkness in colour instead of black — that's the bit I keep seeing quoted, anyway. The spot was supposedly a two-minute walk from the house he was renting.

It was made to order, from what I've read — he put the idea to the new government himself once the French had been pushed back out of Madrid, and got it paid for. There's a companion picture the same size showing the day before, when the fighting started.

The Dutch painters of this moment get filed under Amsterdam Impressionism, which sounds a lot sunnier than what they actually put on canvas: sleet, back canals, half-built streets. They say the point was the city on an ordinary bad day rather than the postcard version.

He is believed to have lived across the street from a club that staged fights like this, so he was more or less painting what went on next door. Prizefighting was illegal in New York at the time, they say, and signing both fighters up as 'members' for the night was the loophole.

This hung as a Goya for years, apparently, before the name underneath got moved to a painter who worked in much the same manner. Same picture, different label.

One out of a huge cycle he kept adding to for decades — love, jealousy, death — built to hang together as a set rather than be met one at a time. He came back to two people kissing over and over, in paint and in prints, and from what I can find the two of them get harder to tell apart with every version.

According to Wikipedia he made a point of painting the shabby corners of the city — back streets, cheap lodgings, music halls — when that wasn't what anyone was buying. He mostly didn't stand out in the road to do it either; the accounts say he worked from small sketches and photographs once he was back indoors.

He painted this same set-up at least three times, from what I can find, swapping a woman in for one of the men in a later go. There's a story that he looked at the two of them in their old-fashioned German coats and said they were up to demagogic intrigues — supposedly a joke about how that kind of dress had become politically suspect to the authorities at the time.

Apparently he managed this whole night scene without touching black paint once — just blues, greens, and that one yellow. He also set the easel up outside and painted it after dark on the actual square, which wasn't really how night scenes got made at the time.