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Dusk vs dawn4/6/2023 ![]() Where the painting shows people or animals, we can use our knowledge of patterns of their activity to give clues as to the time of day. A waxing crescent moon rises and sets after the sun, so for the moon to be higher above the horizon, this should be late sunset rather than dawn. That moon is higher in the sky than the sun, which is only just peeping above the horizon. He has kindly provided a thin sliver of a moon, which is (for the northern hemisphere) a waxing crescent moon, a few days after a new moon. Wikimedia Commons.Īll that I know of Jules Breton’s The Weeders is that it was painted somewhere in northern France in 1868. Jules Breton (1827–1906), The Weeders (1868), oil on canvas, 71.4 × 127.6 cm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY. If you don’t have any useful idea of the location of a view, celestial bodies like the moon can help, when they’re visible in the painting. Again we confirm what the current title tells us. During the last months of Ferdinand Hodler’s life, he continued to paint landscapes from the window of his room in Geneva, looking south-east towards the Mont Blanc massif, as in Lake Geneva with Mont Blanc in the (Red) Dawn Light from 1918. Sometimes you don’t even need to look at a detailed map to work this out. Ferdinand Hodler (1853–1918), Lake Geneva with Mont Blanc in the (Red) Dawn Light (1918), oil on canvas, 74.5 x 150 cm, Private collection. This canvas of Dawn Over Riddarfjärden (1899) therefore looks south-east from that studio into the light of the rising sun, as its title confirms. The Swedish painter Eugène Jansson used views from his studio on Mariaberget in Stockholm. Eugène Jansson (1862–1915), Dawn Over Riddarfjärden (1899), oil on canvas, 150 x 201 cm, Prins Eugens Waldemarsudde, Stockholm, Sweden. Circled numbers refer to locations in the text. Plan of the River Thames around Westminster as at 2015. Émile Claus’s Sunset over Waterloo Bridge from 1916 was painted from a location on the north bank of the Thames slightly to the east of Waterloo Bridge (marked as ⑩ on the map below), the north end of which is prominent, and looks south-west into the setting sun, up river. ![]() When you’re fortunate enough to have a well-known view with obvious landmarks, this is straightforward and often reveals fascinating detail. Émile Claus, (Sunset over Waterloo Bridge) (1916), oil on canvas, dimensions not known, location not known. This usually requires a bit of detective work, but something I not uncommonly do for paintings which I show in articles here. When you can establish exactly where a view was painted, and in which direction the artist was facing, it should be straightforward to work out whether the sun is rising – in likely locations in the northern hemisphere, the south-east – or setting – the south-west (see footnote for full details: it is the east or west part which is decisive). So you should treat any current title with a healthy scepticism until its provenance is established. For a great many older, and some newer, works, we have no good idea of the title given to the painting by the artist. But all too often the only evidence of a painting’s title is it being written onto its reverse, or stuck to the back on a label, which could be far more modern than the painting. ![]() Many paintings made since the middle of the nineteenth century have well-attested histories, such as artist’s and dealer’s records which are held in accessible archives. The only way to check that is to look the work up in a good catalogue raisonné, a luxury that is normally only available to the dedicated researcher. What we seldom know is whether the painting’s current title was assigned to it by the artist – its provenance. If it specifies the time of day, then that can surely be relied on, can’t it?įor those paintings whose current title is that given by the artist, that should be more reliable than anything else. Often the most obvious clue comes from the title given to the painting. In this article, I look at some of the clues we can use to distinguish paintings of dawn from those dusk in the next I’ll show ten paintings, some of them famous, and you can see how many you can get right. Although there are specific circumstances when this may be true, careful optical studies have failed to reveal any consistent differences on which the observer or viewer can rely. There are some who feel, from their observations, that there are clear visual differences in the light of dawn compared with that at dusk. ![]() Today and tomorrow I’m going to look at one relatively common question: does this painting show sunrise or sunset? ![]() Sometimes these can be identified with great precision, but other images prove a real puzzle. One of the fundamental questions when reading them is when that moment occurred: the time of year, and time of day. The great majority of paintings show a single moment in time. ![]()
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