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# Famous Moon and Night-Sky Paintings
- URL: https://blog.fineartamerica.com/famous-moon-and-night-sky-paintings/
- Published: 2026-05-15T10:16:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-31T21:58:51.000Z
- Description: Van Gogh, Friedrich, Grimshaw, Hiroshige — eight paintings that made the night sky one of the great subjects in art.
- Author: Fine Art America
- Tags: Famous Paintings, Art History

**The most famous night-sky painting is Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night, painted in June 1889 from a window of the asylum at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence and now in New York’s Museum of Modern Art. The great moon painters before him were Aert van der Neer, Joseph Wright of Derby, Caspar David Friedrich and John Atkinson Grimshaw.**

## [The Starry Night — Vincent van Gogh, 1889](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/the-starry-night-vincent-van-gogh.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![The Starry Night — Vincent van Gogh, 1889 (Museum of Modern Art, New York)](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/the-starry-night-vincent-van-gogh-10.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/the-starry-night-vincent-van-gogh.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

The Starry Night — Vincent van Gogh, 1889 (Museum of Modern Art, New York)

Van Gogh painted it in June 1889 from the east-facing window of his room in the asylum at Saint-Paul-de-Mausole, having admitted himself the previous month. The rolling hills and the morning star are what he could actually see before dawn; the village with its steep-spired church is invented, and looks more Dutch than Provençal.

The large white body low in the sky beside the cypress is generally identified as Venus, which was conspicuous before dawn that month. [Van Gogh himself was unconvinced by the picture](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/the-starry-night-vincent-van-gogh.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com) and wrote about it dismissively to his brother. The Museum of Modern Art bought it in 1941.

## [Two Men Contemplating the Moon — Caspar David Friedrich, c. 1825–30](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/21-two-men-contemplating-the-moon-caspar-david-friedrich.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![Two Men Contemplating the Moon — Caspar David Friedrich, c. 1825–30 (Metropolitan Museum of Art)](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/21-two-men-contemplating-the-moon-caspar-david-friedrich-2.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/21-two-men-contemplating-the-moon-caspar-david-friedrich.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

Two Men Contemplating the Moon — Caspar David Friedrich, c. 1825–30 (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Two figures stand on a rocky path beneath a dying oak, backs to us, watching a crescent moon with the evening star beside it. Friedrich painted several versions of this composition; it is the purest statement of his method, which is to put a stranger between you and the view so that you watch someone else looking.

The men wear old German dress, a nationalist gesture that was politically suspect in Restoration Germany — Friedrich is said to have remarked that they were plotting demagogic intrigues. [Samuel Beckett claimed a version of the picture](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/21-two-men-contemplating-the-moon-caspar-david-friedrich.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com) gave him the image for *Waiting for Godot*.

## [Moonlit Landscape with a View of the New Amstel River — Aert van der Neer](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/moonlit-landscape-with-a-view-of-the-new-amstel-river-aert-van-der-neer.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![Moonlit Landscape with a View of the New Amstel River — Aert van der Neer](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/moonlit-landscape-with-a-view-of-the-new-amstel-river-aert-van-der-neer-2.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/moonlit-landscape-with-a-view-of-the-new-amstel-river-aert-van-der-neer.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

Moonlit Landscape with a View of the New Amstel River — Aert van der Neer

Long before Romanticism made the moon a symbol, a Dutch painter made it a specialty. Aert van der Neer (about 1603–1677) built an entire career on two subjects: winter scenes and moonlight. Here the moon sits low behind broken cloud over the Amstel outside Amsterdam, and almost everything in the picture is silhouette, with a thin bright road of reflection laid across the water.

The commercial logic did not work. Van der Neer opened an inn to support himself, went bankrupt in 1662 and died poor. [His nocturnes are now the reason anyone remembers him](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/moonlit-landscape-with-a-view-of-the-new-amstel-river-aert-van-der-neer.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com).

## [Dovedale by Moonlight — Joseph Wright of Derby, 1784–85](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/3-dovedale-by-moonlight-joseph-wright-of-derby.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![Dovedale by Moonlight — Joseph Wright of Derby, 1784–85](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/3-dovedale-by-moonlight-joseph-wright-of-derby-2.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/3-dovedale-by-moonlight-joseph-wright-of-derby.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

Dovedale by Moonlight — Joseph Wright of Derby, 1784–85

Wright of Derby was the great English painter of artificial light — candles, forges, the lamp in *An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump*. Moonlight was the same problem in reverse, and he treated Dovedale in Derbyshire as an exercise in it, painting the same limestone valley both by daylight and by moonlight.

The moon is half-hidden in cloud, throwing a cold green wash down the cliffs and a hard line of silver along the river. [There is no figure, no incident and no story](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/3-dovedale-by-moonlight-joseph-wright-of-derby.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com) — unusual for 1785, and the reason the picture still looks modern.

## [Nearing Home — John Atkinson Grimshaw](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/nearing-home-john-atkinson-grimshaw.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![Nearing Home — John Atkinson Grimshaw](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/nearing-home-john-atkinson-grimshaw-2.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/nearing-home-john-atkinson-grimshaw.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

Nearing Home — John Atkinson Grimshaw

A wet suburban lane, bare trees, a single figure with a dog, and a moon breaking through cloud so that the whole road turns to reflected light. Grimshaw (1836–1893) built his reputation in Leeds on this one motif, painted dozens of times with small variations of season and weather, and nobody has done rain-under-moonlight better.

He worked from photographs and used them without embarrassment, which is part of why the perspective feels so exact. [Whistler paid him the best compliment on record](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/nearing-home-john-atkinson-grimshaw.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com): he had considered himself the inventor of nocturnes until he saw Grimshaw’s moonlit pictures.

## [Full Moon over Takanawa — Utagawa Hiroshige](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/full-moon-over-takanawa-from-the-series-famous-places-ando-hiroshige.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![Full Moon over Takanawa — Utagawa (Andō) Hiroshige](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/full-moon-over-takanawa-from-the-series-famous-places-ando-hiroshige-2.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/full-moon-over-takanawa-from-the-series-famous-places-ando-hiroshige.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

Full Moon over Takanawa — Utagawa (Andō) Hiroshige

Geese cross a huge full moon above the curve of Edo Bay at Takanawa, boats moored below, the sky banded pink at the horizon. The subject is the harvest moon — *tsukimi*, the autumn custom of gathering to watch the full moon, which in Japan carried the cultural weight that sunsets have in the West.

Hiroshige (1797–1858) produced several thousand designs and made the moon a recurring device for turning a topographical view into a mood. [Prints like this reached Paris in the 1860s](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/full-moon-over-takanawa-from-the-series-famous-places-ando-hiroshige.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com), and Van Gogh thought enough of Hiroshige to copy two of his designs in oil.

## [Moonlight Marine — Albert Pinkham Ryder, 1870–90](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/2-moonlight-marine-albert-pinkham-ryder.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![Moonlight Marine — Albert Pinkham Ryder, 1870–90 (Metropolitan Museum of Art)](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/2-moonlight-marine-albert-pinkham-ryder-2.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/2-moonlight-marine-albert-pinkham-ryder.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

Moonlight Marine — Albert Pinkham Ryder, 1870–90 (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

A small boat under a moon smothered in cloud, the sea reduced to three or four dark shapes. It is barely a foot across and it is one of the strangest American paintings of the nineteenth century: no detail survives, only the bones of a composition.

Ryder (1847–1917) worked on pictures for years, piling up paint, varnish and bitumen in layers that were chemically doomed — the surfaces cracked in his own lifetime and are why so many of his works look excavated. He is also the most forged American painter, with fakes long outnumbering the real thing. [The Metropolitan Museum owns this one](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/2-moonlight-marine-albert-pinkham-ryder.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com).

## [Luna — Evelyn De Morgan](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/1-luna-evelyn-de-morgan.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![Luna — Evelyn De Morgan](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/1-luna-evelyn-de-morgan-2.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/1-luna-evelyn-de-morgan.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

Luna — Evelyn De Morgan

The moon as a person, not a light source: a woman reclining inside a crescent, drapery and cord looping around her, a globe of pale sky behind and dark hills below. The subject is ancient — Luna, Selene, Diana — and De Morgan takes it up in the Pre-Raphaelite manner she learned from Burne-Jones, all long limbs and cool, chalky color.

Evelyn De Morgan (1855–1919) was among the first women to study at the Slade, painted allegories throughout a long career, and was a committed spiritualist and pacifist. [Her moon is the one image here](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/1-luna-evelyn-de-morgan.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com) that belongs to myth rather than to weather.

## Frequently asked questions

### What is the most famous painting of the night sky?

Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night, painted in June 1889 while he was a patient at the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. It has been in the Museum of Modern Art in New York since 1941\. Van Gogh had painted two earlier night pictures at Arles — Café Terrace at Night and Starry Night Over the Rhône — but neither approaches its fame.

### Is the sky in The Starry Night accurate?

Partly. The large bright body beside the cypress is generally identified as Venus, which was prominent in the pre-dawn sky over Saint-Rémy in June 1889, and the hills correspond to the view from Van Gogh’s window. The swirling movement, the exaggerated stars and the steep-spired village are invented — the village looks Dutch rather than Provençal.

### What is a nocturne in painting?

A night scene painted for atmosphere rather than narrative. The word was borrowed from music by James McNeill Whistler in the 1870s for his tonal river scenes, and has since been applied backward to earlier night painters such as Aert van der Neer and John Atkinson Grimshaw. Whistler himself admitted Grimshaw had got there before him.

### Who painted the best moonlight?

Two names come up repeatedly. Aert van der Neer, working in the Dutch Republic in the mid-seventeenth century, effectively invented moonlight as a genre and painted little else. John Atkinson Grimshaw, in Victorian Leeds, perfected the wet moonlit lane and is unmatched at the way a road behaves after rain under a clouded moon.

### Why does the moon appear so often in Japanese prints?

Moon-viewing — tsukimi — was a formal autumn custom, and the moon carried centuries of poetic association with impermanence, longing and the passing seasons. Print designers used it as shorthand for mood and time of year. Hiroshige used it topographically, Tsukioka Yoshitoshi devoted an entire late series, One Hundred Aspects of the Moon, to it.

### What does the moon symbolize in art?

It changes with the period. In classical and Pre-Raphaelite painting it is a goddess — Luna, Selene, Diana — and stands for chastity and change. In Dutch and English landscape it is simply a light source and a technical challenge. In German Romanticism, Friedrich above all, it becomes an emblem of contemplation and of hope in a darkened world.

Night pictures behave unusually on a wall: they are dark enough to read as a block of color from across a room and detailed enough to reward standing close. Every painting above is available as a [canvas](https://fineartamerica.com/shop/canvas+prints?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com), [framed](https://fineartamerica.com/shop/framed+prints?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com) or [art prints](https://fineartamerica.com/shop/prints?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com), and there is more in the [night sky collection](https://fineartamerica.com/art/night+sky?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com) and the rest of our [famous paintings](https://fineartamerica.com/art/famous+paintings?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com).