Every human being who has ever lived has seen the same moon. It is the one object in the sky, apart from the sun, that looks like a place. It changes shape through the month. It lights the night. It has been a calendar, a goddess, a destination and a symbol of almost everything people feel after dark.
It is no surprise that it has been painted, printed and photographed more than nearly any other subject. Here is what it has meant, and what it does in a picture.
The moon as a clock
Long before written calendars, the moon kept time. It goes from new to full and back in about twenty-nine and a half days, and the cycle is easy to see and count. The word month comes from moon. Many of the world's calendars are still based on it, and many festivals fall on a particular moon.
So the first thing the moon stands for is time passing in cycles: things that wane and return.
The moon as change
The sun looks the same every day. The moon never looks the same two nights running. It grows, shrinks and vanishes. For that reason it became the symbol of change, of things that are inconstant, and also of renewal, because it always comes back.
Its phases are a ready-made picture of any process: beginning, growing, fullness, decline, rest.
The moon as the other light
Moonlight is not like daylight. It is cool and silver, it flattens colour, and it leaves deep shadow. A landscape under the moon is recognisable and strange at once. Artists have used that for centuries to show the world transformed: quiet, mysterious, a little unreal.
The Romantic painters of the early 1800s loved it. One German painter returned again and again to figures seen from behind, standing still and gazing at a moon over the sea or through bare trees. The pictures are about looking, and longing, and feeling small before something vast.
The moon in story
- In ancient Greece and Rome, the moon was a goddess who drove a silver chariot across the night sky.
- In East Asia, people see a rabbit in the moon's markings, not a face. In Chinese tradition it is pounding the elixir of life. A goddess lives there too, and the mid-autumn festival is held in honour of the full moon.
- In Japan, gathering to view the autumn moon is a custom more than a thousand years old. An ancient tale tells of a princess found inside a bamboo stalk who turns out to belong to the moon, and returns to it.
- In European folklore, the full moon was linked with madness and with transformation. The word lunatic comes from the Latin for moon.
Across all of these the moon is associated with night, dreams, intuition and the hidden side of things.
The moon as a place
In 1969 people walked on it. The moon stopped being only a symbol and became somewhere that had been visited, with footprints on it. The photographs from those missions changed the way artists drew it. It became cratered, grey and real, a world with a surface.
Modern art about the moon holds both ideas at once: the old symbol and the real place.
What a moon does in a picture
- It gives a focal point. A bright circle in a dark field draws the eye at once.
- It sets the time. One moon and the scene is night.
- It sets the mood. Calm, reflective, a little melancholy or a little magical.
- It explains the light. It gives the artist a reason for the cool, silver glow over everything.
- It gives scale. A moon over a landscape makes the landscape feel small.
A moon with a ring
Starlight City shows a city spread across a curved horizon, under a sky dense with stars. In the upper right hangs a large, pale, cratered moon, and around it is a bright ring, like the rings of Saturn.
The moon does all the traditional jobs here. It is the focal point, the source of the mood and the measure of scale. The ring adds something. Our moon has none, so this is another world, or a dream of ours. The familiar symbol has been made strange, and the picture moves from landscape to imagination. We look at it in Starlight City: a closer look.
The canvas version is listed as Starlight Cityscape. A small, glitched moon also appears above the planet in Earth Glitched.
Where moon art works
- The bedroom. The obvious home. The moon belongs to night and sleep, and moonlit scenes are dark and calm.
- A reading corner or study. A quiet, contemplative image.
- A hallway. A bright circle on a dark ground reads instantly.
- A child's room. The moon is one of the first things children learn to name.
- A room in blue, grey or silver.
Hanging it
- Dark or white walls both work. On navy or charcoal the moon glows.
- Use matte or canvas. Night scenes are dark, and dark art under glass reflects the room.
- Light it softly. A cool white lamp to one side. Warm light dulls the silver.
- Pair it with other night scenes, or with a single figure looking up. See celestial tapestries for the bedroom and astronauts in art.
Why it lasts
The moon is the same for everyone and means something slightly different to each person: a memory of a particular night, a person far away who can see it too, a sense of time going round. A picture with a moon in it carries all that without saying a word. Browse the poster prints and canvas art collections for more night skies.