Before gas lighting and electricity, the night was a dangerous realm. Medieval artists seldom painted night scenes (nocturnes), largely because darkness was nearly impossible to render until the 15th-century invention of oil paint enabled “smoky” techniques like chiaroscuro and sfumato.
Centuries later, the rise of artificial lighting not only illuminated big cities, it also gave artists new ways to depict people who slip into the shadows. In nocturnes, you won’t always find beauty in the scene itself—which can feel lonely or menacing—but in the way light reveals moments of truth.
British artist Joseph Mallord William Turner excelled in portraying the world’s natural luminosity. In Keelmen Heaving in Coals by Moonlight, the moon’s opalescent glow competes with fiery orange torches for your attention. Shimmering reflections animate the water.
In this nocturne, the Industrial Revolution is in full swing as workers at the port of Newcastle haul coal onto tall ships bound for London. Britain is on its way to becoming a global empire. The environmental toll on the River Tyne is just a footnote.
When I look at this waterfront, I’m struck by the things we’re concerned about now, in terms of environmental health and human modification of the planet. Of course, I also see jobs. Trying to balance these things is the razor’s edge we’re on these days.
Joel Fodrie, Estuarine ecologist, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
While some consider Turner’s moonlight too high-wattage, I see it differently. That radiance transforms the scene from an omen of decay into an exuberant display of industrial might.
Lanterns in the sky
With the emergence of artificial lighting, many artists traded moonlit vistas for the incandescent energy of the modern metropolis.
In Nocturne at the Parc Royal, Brussels, William Degouve de Nuncques transforms an urban park into a peaceful yet disquieting place. Cool greens and blues create a ghostly stillness. Gas lamps hang in the moist night air like multiple moons.
Rendered in pastel rather than oil, this is the art of painting softly.
Degouve created this image during the 1897 Brussels International Exposition, a celebration of the city’s leap into modernity. The fair’s centerpiece was a colossal sun ablaze with 1,000 electric light bulbs. Amidst this spectacle, did he hope to capture a more serene vision of Brussels and escape that garish mechanical glow?
Years later, Degouve’s Belgian successor, René Magritte, drew inspiration from this nocturne to develop his unsettling Empire of Light series.
Whispers in the dark
“I’m always interested in the movement of humanity in the street,” said American Impressionist Childe Hassam. From his Fifth Avenue studio, he captured this urban rhythm firsthand, painting the city as it pulsed with life after the sun went down.
In Fifth Avenue Nocturne, newly installed streetlights cast a hazy glow over rain-slicked sidewalks. A woman in silhouette moves toward a man waiting in the distance. By veiling them in shadow, Hassam invites us to project our own narratives onto the pair.
Are they bound for home or a new destination? Strangers or companions? The intentional ambiguity imbues the scene with a quiet sensuality.
For Hassam and his male viewers, there was an erotic pleasure to be had by maintaining a state of indetermination. The female silhouette emerging from the darkness, neither too close nor too far away, sufficiently vague without being completely formless, allows the beholder to project his desires and fantasies onto her.
Art historian Hélène Valance, “Nocturne: Night in American Art,” 2018
This “erotic pleasure of the unknown” mirrored a societal shift, as more women began navigating the city alone after dark. By the 1890s, these solitary figures presented a visual puzzle: was she a “lady of the evening” or a theater-goer returning home? The urban night was the new frontier.
The near-death of privacy
As cities grew more luminous and dense, certain social encounters became more strained. Nocturnes record this transition, shifting from moonlit seascapes to crowded streets and voyeuristic bedrooms.
In Six O’Clock, Winter, American Ashcan School artist John Sloan captures the peak of evening rush hour. Working from sketches made in the freezing cold, he employs a two-pronged perspective: a chaotic group of commuters set against the dark silhouette of the “Third Avenue El” commuter train.
In their busy hours, our downtown streets are unusually black—not only because they are very dense, but because black is the customary wear of men.
Architectural critic Mariana Griswold Van Rennsselaer, “Century Magazine,” 1895
Rather than detailing individual faces, Sloan uses mask-like features to convey both energy and tension. This creates a haunting duality—one that leaves me wondering if he’s celebrating the pulse of the city or critiquing its overwhelming pace.
The rise of cinematic moments
The Third Avenue El was notorious for its smothering closeness to residential life, with tracks that passed so near to apartment buildings they nearly touched. American artist Edward Hopper channels this voyeuristic reality in Night Windows.
Here, he reverses his signature trope: instead of a woman looking out a window, he puts us in the position of peering into a stranger’s bedroom. The perspective feels cinematic, as if caught in a flash from a passing train. This sense of motion carries through the entire frame—from the fluttering curtains, to the curve of the woman’s back, to the red scarf draped over a lampshade.
As critic Henry McBride wryly noted, “Hopper’s work has its crudities, but it’s always honest.”
Cold moon over a silent trail
Even as electricity was transforming our major cities, war correspondent and artist Frederic Remington was in the American West, capturing moonlit scenes of a vanishing world.
In The Luckless Hunter, an Indigenous rider and his weary horse navigate a desolate, starlit landscape. The brittle moonlight and muddy-green palette evoke a profound sense of displacement. This man is becoming a stranger in his own ancestral home.
Remington captures a grim turning point in history. In 1890, the U.S. Census Bureau declared the American frontier “closed,” marking the forced transition of Native Americans to reservations.
The aesthetic of the nocturne—darkness—was remarkably congruent with the idea of an Indian people seemingly destined to vanish.
Art historian Hélène Valance, “Nocturne: Night in American Art,” 2018
The feeling of erasure is equally palpable in The Hungry Moon, where three figures butcher a bison in the dead of night. Named for the winter moon, the painting depicts a season of starvation, leaving the Indigenous figures suspended in a moment of unseen peril.
In truth, Remington found nocturnes challenging to paint. He once vowed to “get the colors right if I only live long enough.”
A supreme test of skill
Night scenes require an artist to navigate a compressed value scale where the distinction between “dark” and “darker” is agonizingly subtle. James Abbott McNeill Whistler—the first to apply the musical term “nocturne” to painting—drew fierce criticism for his atmospheric approach.
The tension peaked when art critic John Ruskin publicly dismissed Whistler’s Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket as “flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.” Whistler sued for libel and won. However, the legal fees forced him into bankruptcy.
Despite his personal loss, the 1878 trial marked a watershed moment in art history, inspiring artists to embrace nocturnes as a means of transcending the literal.
As light fades and shadows deepen, all petty and exacting details vanish. The buttons are lost, but the sitter remains; the sitter is lost, but the shadow remains; the shadow is lost, but the picture remains—a vision that not even night can efface.
James A. McNeill Whistler, “Recollections and Impressions of Whistler” (1903)
If you happen to be in San Antonio…
Explore the Briscoe Western Art Museum located along the beautiful San Antonio River Walk. The museum showcases a diverse collection of works dedicated to the history and culture of the American West, including paintings and sculpture by Frederic Remington.