Moonrise

Jean-Charles Cazin was a French landscape painter, ceramicist, and museum curator who studied under Lecoq de Boisbaudran, a teacher famous for training artists to paint from memory. Cazin spent time in England, where the Pre-Raphaelites influenced his early work, and later posed for the figure of Eustache de Saint-Pierre in Rodin's Burghers of Calais. He was especially known for moonlit landscapes painted around Équihen on the northern French coast — deserted village streets, empty squares, stone cottages lit by a single source. His work is in the Met, the Musée d'Orsay, and the National Gallery in Washington. In Moonrise, a cluster of stone cottages with weathered roofs sits on a low rise of coastal scrubland, with a white full moon rising just behind them at right. A dirt path and a rough wooden fence lead into the foreground. The sky is flat gray-blue and the ground is painted in loose, quick strokes of green, yellow, ochre, and pink.