Rotterdam in the Moonlight

Moonlight gleams on the Maas and on the masts and hulls of ships moored at Rotterdam, the quay and warehouses reduced to dark silhouettes under a luminous sky. Johan Barthold Jongkind, whose free handling of light and weather made him one of the decisive sources of Impressionism, painted this night view from the harbour town of his birth in 1881, near the end of his career. The silvery tonality and the broad, direct notation of the reflections show exactly the manner that the young Claude Monet acknowledged as his own point of departure.