Moonrise

William Padgett was an English landscape painter who exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1881 to 1898, as well as the Grosvenor Gallery, the New Gallery, and the International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers, where Whistler served as president. He lived in London, Hampton, and Twickenham, and was the son of a wine merchant. In Moonrise, a golden wheat field slopes upward from left to right, filling most of the canvas. Two slender birch trunks stand at the left edge, and a pale pink-orange moon sits low on the horizon at right, just above a dark tree line and what appears to be a red-roofed building. The sky is a flat, luminous pink-gray. Scattered wildflowers — purples and blues — push up through the wheat in the foreground.