Jacques Rosseels, Moonlight

by Atelier Liesjes

A full moon hangs high in a misty, grey-green sky, casting a narrow glimmer upon the water. Beneath it, a low brick bridge stands out, with two square piers whose tops disappear into the darkness. To the left of the bridge stands a wooden lock gate with a long operating lever pointing straight up; to the right, two flat-bottomed barges are moored along a stone-reinforced bank. Bare pollarded willows and alders thrust their branches like brooms against the sky. In the foreground, the muddy bank is visible, strewn with fallen leaves, reeds and a few dark stones. Between the piers, the span is little more than a dark band, through which the moonlight does not penetrate. The painting comes alive through what you can barely see. Rosseels maintains the entire composition in a narrow, silvery-green tone, with a warm accent only in the moon and in a single ochre-yellow patch on the bank. The paint is thin and streaky; the forms remain vague, as if the landscape were bathed in twilight. The water is painted with long, smooth strokes and catches what little light there is. Here, the night is not merely a backdrop but an atmosphere of silence and desolation, in which humankind is entirely absent. This makes the work akin to Neo-Romanticism and Symbolist landscape painting, in which the night is not merely a time of day but a mood.
Jacques Rosseels (Antwerp 1828 – Antwerp 1912) painted not only sunny polder scenes but also night scenes such as this one, in which he made the moonlight and the stillness of the water his subject. His work belongs to the tradition of nineteenth-century Belgian Realism and is valued for its restrained use of colour. He was one of the few Belgian landscape painters of his generation to venture into moonlit night scenes. A poetic, sombre work for an atmospheric interior.