TitleMoonrise
Artist
Thomas Alexander Harrison
(American, 1853 - 1930)
Daten.d.
MediumOil on canvas
DimensionsUnframed: 20 1/4 × 60 1/4 in.
Framed: 25 1/4 × 65 × 2 1/4 in.
SignedSigned at lower left: "A. Harrison"
SubmissionNA diploma presentation, April 7, 1902
Credit LineNational Academy of Design, New York, NY
Object number540-P
Label TextHarrison's early work with the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey may have left him predisposed to the charms of his most celebrated pictorial type, nocturnal beach scenes. His extended series of expansive horizontal "wave" paintings began in the early 1880s. The most famous example was The Wave (1885, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia), a sunlit depiction of the complexities of advancing and receding sheets of water on glistening sand.Harrison's diploma contribution depicts a slightly more volatile night sea. The breaking wave is situated at the center of the painting; however, the moon is placed to the left, creating a slight asymmetrical tension by appearing to draw the right edge of the foaming line of water up the picture plane, as if by some powerful gravitational pull. As always, Harrison is particularly sensitive to the play of light, darkening the undersides of crests not penetrated by the soft moonlight and heightening the values of the translucent water as it spreads itself, frothing, onto the flat beach.
The painting was known simply as Marine until the discovery in 1987 of a label fragment on the stretcher bearing its title. It is possible that the Academy's painting was the one Harrison showed in Chicago in 1889.
In 1910 the Council agreed to lend Moonrise to Henry Wolf so that he might make an engraved reproduction of it; however, no engraving has been located.
