Moonlight on the Yare

John Crome

National Gallery of Art

Two windmills are backlit by silvery moonlight along the horizon of this loosely painted, horizontal landscape. The horizon comes about a third of the way up the composition. The left half of the painting is nearly filled with a towering tree with muted olive-green leaves and a tan trunk. Some dark branches dip toward the river that runs from the bottom center of the painting into the distance, in front of the windmills. Light shimmers on the gently rippling surface, which is lined to our right with grassy vegetation. A hollowed out, gnarled, broken tree trunk twists against the sky from the riverbank to our right. The windmills are in the near distance, facing off to our left. Their sails create Xs against the screen of pearly white clouds floating against a muted blue sky.