''The Empire of Light'' (French: ''L'Empire des lumières'') is the title of a succession of paintings by René Magritte.Kantrowitz, Jonathan (25 November 2017),
René Magritte: The Fifth Season
'. Art History News. (accessed 19 December 2020) They depict the paradoxical image of a nocturnal landscape beneath a sunlit sky. He explored the theme in 27 paintings (17 oil paintings and 10

gouaches Gouache (; ), body color, or opaque watercolor is a water-medium paint consisting of natural pigment, water, a binding agent (usually gum arabic or dextrin), and sometimes additional inert material. Gouache is designed to be opaque. Gouache h ...

) from the 1940s to the 1960s.Peyser, Marijke. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam:
A dream collection - Surrealism in Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen
' (accessed 19 December 2020)Zivkovic, Alex (2018),
"'It's Like Being in the Picture': The Dominion of Light at SFMOMA"
'. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (accessed 19 December 2020) The paintings were not planned as a formal series. They have never all been exhibited together and are rarely exhibited in smaller groups. The original French title, ''L'Empire des Lumieres'' is sometimes translated as singular, ''The Empire of Light'',Noël, Bernard (1977), ''Magritte''. Crown Publishers, Inc. New York. 96 pp. Rubin, William S. (1968) ''Dada and Surrealist Art''. Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, New York. 525 pp.and sometimes as plural ''The Empire of Lights''.Hammacher, A. M. (1973) ''Magritte''. The Library of Great Painters. Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, New York, 167 pp. Torczyner, Harry (1977) ''Magritte: Ideas and Images''. Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, New York, 277 pp. Other translations include ''The Dominion of Light'': making the distinction: "an empire exists in relation to a ruler, a dominion does not necessarily require this.”

Precursors, influences, and origins

One source states the artist was inspired by the works of

John Atkinson Grimshaw John Atkinson Grimshaw (6 September 1836 – 13 October 1893) was an English Victorian-era artist best known for his nocturnal scenes of urban landscapes.Alexander Robertson, ''Atkinson Grimshaw'', London, Phaidon Press, 1996 H. J. Dyos and ...

, an English painter from the Victorian era, who had delighted in his time to paint urban views at sunset. More perceptively, other sources identify the nocturnal paintings by the Belgian

symbolist Symbolism was a late 19th-century art movement of French and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts seeking to represent absolute truths symbolically through language and metaphorical images, mainly as a reaction against naturalism and realis ...

William Degouve de Nuncques William Degouve de Nuncques (also Nunques) was a Belgian painter, born 28 February 1867 and died 1 March 1935. He was associated with the symbolist movement although he is occasionally referred to as a postimpressionist. He is best known for his ...

(1867 – 1935) as an influence on Magritte's series, specifically his painting ''The Blind House''.Cassou, Jean (1984) ''The Concise Encyclopaedia of Symbolism''. Chartwell Books, Inc. Secaucus, New Jersey. 292 pp. The art historian and former director of the Kröller-Müller Museum in the Netherlands, A. M . Hammacher also observed that Magritte was "highly interested" in the landscapes of the great German romantic painter

Caspar David Friedrich Caspar David Friedrich (5 September 1774 – 7 May 1840) was a 19th-century German Romantic landscape painter, generally considered the most important German artist of his generation. He is best known for his mid-period allegorical landscape ...

William Rubin William Stanley Rubin (August 11, 1927January 22, 2006) was an American art scholar, a distinguished curator, critic, collector, art historian and teacher of modern art. From 1968 to 1988, Rubin was a curator at The Museum of Modern Art located ...

made comparisons between some of Max Ernst's frottage paintings, specifically ''Forest''

1927), oil on canvas 114 x 146 cm. in Joseph Slifka collection, New York at that time Nineteen or 19 may refer to: * 19 (number), the natural number following 18 and preceding 20 * one of the years 19 BC, AD 19, 1919, 2019 Films * ''19'' (film), a 2001 Japanese film * ''Nineteen'' (film), a 1987 science fiction film Music ...

commenting of Ernst's painting "the night landscape enigmatically includes a bright daylight sky (Magritte was to explore this same conjunction later in ''The Empire of Light II'')." Comparisons with Salvador Dali's gouache ''Night and Day Clothes'' (1936) and Max Ernst's ''Day and Night'' (1941–42) in the Menil Collection are also intriguing. An early example of Magritte playing with the idea of the simultaneous appearance of night and day is a gouache painted in 1939 that is now in the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. In this gouache, the horizon of a twilight sky is sharply lit by a sunset casting a group of trees and houses in the foreground in a black silhouette which is filled with stars and a crescent moon. A book on Magritte published in 1973 identifies the gouache as ''La Bonne Aventure'' (''Good Fortune''), however the website of the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen gives the title as ''Le poison'' (''The Poison'') and states it is the first in the series ''The Empire of Light''.

The series

Although Magritte had already completed a few versions by 1953, a retrospective at the 1954 Venice Biennale included a 1954 version (now in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection) that attracted several collectors with expectations of buying the painting. Magritte ended up producing multiple large, high quality versions that year to satisfy the collectors, and he continued to occasionally explore the theme in paintings for the rest of his life. The motif was included in the designs for a series of murals in the main gaming room at the Municipal Casino at Knokke-Le Zoute in Belgium. Titled ''The Enchanted Domain'', Magritte produced a set of eight easel sized paintings reprising and intergrading numerous themes that had appeared in his previous work. His paintings were then copied to the walls on a 1:6 scale, in a 360-degree panorama (236 ft., 71.93 m. circumference), under his supervision and completed in 1953. Another painting from 1958, in which Magritte switched the lighting, with a sunlit landscape under a night sky is ''Le salon de Dieu'' (''God's Drawing Room''), oil on canvas, 43 x 59 cm., (in the private collection of Arnold Weissberger, New York in 1977). Magritte discussed the painting in an undated letter to

Suzi Gablik Suzi Gablik (September 26, 1934 – May 7, 2022) was an American visual artist, author, art critic, and professor of art history and art criticism. She lived in Blacksburg, Virginia. Early life and education Gablik was born in New York City on ...

stating: "I'd like to tell you I've brought off a very difficult picture, but which is probably too difficult to be successful? It involves a painting of a daylit landscape with a nocturnal sky (stars and crescent moon). I've painted and repainted this picture and I'm at the disenchanted stage, It's a total failure! A friend found as title ''Le salon de Dieu'' (''God's Drawing Room''): I hesitated a long time in adopting it; a title such as ''Le bal masqué'' (''The Masked Ball'') seemed preferable to me for many reasons, the main one being the total ban on saying anything at all about God. But to see it and reproduce it in paint is possible only if one is a God. While waiting to become one, I'm abandoning the project."

Quotes from the artist and André Breton

Magritte commented on the paintings in a televised interview in 1956, about the time he received his Guggenheim Prize.

For me, the conception of a painting is an idea of one thing or several things that can become visible through my painting. It is understood that all ideas are not conceptions for pictures. Obviously, an idea must be sufficiently stimulating for me to undertake to paint faithfully the thing or things I have ideated. The conception of a picture, that is, the idea, is not visible in the picture: an idea cannot be seen with the eyes. What is represented in a picture is what is visible to the eyes, it is the thing or things that must have been ideated. Thus, what are represented in the picture ''The Empire of Light'' are the things I ideated, i.e. a nighttime landscape and a sky such as we see during the day. The landscape evokes night and the sky evokes day. I call this power: poetry. If I believe this evocation has such poetic power, it is because among other reasons, I have always felt the greatest interest in night and in day, yet without ever having preferred one or the other. This great personal interest in night and day is a feeling of admiration and astonishment."

In 1964, John and

Dominique "Dominique" is a 1963 French language popular song, written and performed by the Belgian female singer Jeannine Deckers, better known as Sœur Sourire ("Sister Smile" in French) or The Singing Nun. The song is about Saint Dominic, a Spanish-bo ...

de Menil organized an exhibition of Magritte's work in Houston, Texas. The Belgian surrealist attended the exhibit, replete in an incongruous cowboy hat and boots.

André Breton André Robert Breton (; 19 February 1896 – 28 September 1966) was a French writer and poet, the co-founder, leader, and principal theorist of surrealism. His writings include the first ''Surrealist Manifesto'' (''Manifeste du surréalisme'') o ...

wrote the introduction for the exhibition catalogue and commented on the Empire of Light'' paintings. Breton, André (1964), ''The Breadth of Rene Magitte'', 5-7 pp. In Magritte. The Art Department of the University of St. Thomas, Houston Texas. 36 pp. ranslated by W. G. Ryan/ref>

"Rene Magritte's work and thought could not fail to come out at the opposite pole from the zone of facility - and of capitulation - that goes by the name of " chiaroscuro." To him, inevitably, fell the task of separating the "subtle" from the "dense", without which effort no transmutation is possible. To attack this problem called for all his audacity - to extract simultaneously what is light from the shadow and what is shadow from the light (''L'Empire des Lumieres''). In this work the violence done to accepted ideas and conventions is such (I - Breton - have this from Magritte) that most of those who go by quickly think they saw the stars in the daytime sky."

A partial list of paintings related to ''The Empire of Light''

* ''Good Fortune'' or ''The Poison'' (1939), gouache, 33.6 x 40.6 cm., Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. * ''The Empire of Light'' (1948), 100 x 80 cm., private collection, Brussels, Belgium* * ''The Empire of Light II'' (1950), 79 x 99 cm. Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York (Gift of the Menils) * ''The Empire of Light III'' (1951), 78.7 x 66 cm.,

William Alexander William or Bill Alexander may refer to: Literature *William Alexander (poet) (1808–1875), American poet and author * William Alexander (journalist and author) (1826–1894), Scottish journalist and author *William Alexander (author) (born 1976), ...

, New York, New York* * ''The Empire of Light'' (1953), 37 x 45 cm. Arnold Weissberger, New York, New York* * ''The Empire of Light'' (1954), 195.4 x 131.2 cm., Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, Italy * ''The Empire of Light VIII'' (1954), 129.9 x 94.6 cm.,

The Menil Collection The Menil Collection, located in Houston, Texas, refers either to a museum that houses the art collection of founders John de Menil and Dominique de Menil, or to the collection itself of approximately 17,000 paintings, sculptures, prints, drawing ...

, Houston, Texas * ''The Empire of Light'' (1954), 146 x 114 cm.,

Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium The Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium (french: Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, nl, Koninklijke Musea voor Schone Kunsten van België) are a group of art museums in Brussels, Belgium. They include six museums: the Oldmasters Muse ...

, Brussels, Belgium * ''The Empire of Light'' (1958), 49.5 x 39.5 cm., New York, New York* * ''God's Drawing Room'' (1958), 43 x 59 cm., Arnold Weissberger, New York* * ''The Empire of Light'' (1961), 114 x 146 cm., private collection, Brussels, Belgium* * ''The Empire of Light'' (no date), private collection, Brussels, Belgium* * ''The Empire of Light'' (1967, unfinished), 45 x 50 cm.,

Magritte Museum The Magritte Museum (french: Musée Magritte, nl, Magritte Museum) is an art museum in central Brussels, Belgium, dedicated to the work of the Belgian surrealist artist, René Magritte. It is one of the constituent museums of the Royal Museu ...

, Brussels, Belgium All works are oil on canvas unless noted otherwise. An asterisk (*) indicates the collection based on a 1977 publication and may not reflect the current collection.

Legacy, influences, and trivia

The paintings inspired a scene in the 1973 horror film '' The Exorcist'', which was used on the film's posters and home video releases, in which the character

Father Merrin A father is the male parent of a child. Besides the paternal bonds of a father to his children, the father may have a parental, legal, and social relationship with the child that carries with it certain rights and obligations. An adoptive fathe ...

stands in front of the MacNeil family's house. It also inspired the artwork for the cover of

Jackson Browne Clyde Jackson Browne (born October 9, 1948) is an American musician, singer, songwriter, and political activist who has sold over 18 million albums in the United States. Emerging as a precocious teenage songwriter in mid-1960s Los Angeles, he h ...

's 1974 album '' Late for the Sky''.

Gallery of comparative paintings

File:John Atkinson Grimshaw - Boar Lane, Leeds.jpg, John Atkinson Grimshaw, ''Boar Lane'', Leeds, 1880s File:Caspar David Friedrich - Abtei im Eichwald - Google Art Project.jpg, Caspar David Friedrich, ''Abbey in the Oakwood'' (1809-10), oil on canvas, 171 x 110.4 cm., Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin File:Caspar David Friedrich - Ruinen in der Abenddämmerung (ca 1831).jpg, Caspar David Friedrich, ''Church ruin in the forest'' (c. 1831), oil on canvas, 70.5 x 49.7 cm., Neue Pinakothek, Munich File:1892 Degouve de Nuncques Het blinde huis anagoria.JPG, William Degouve de Nuncques, ''The Blind House'' (1892), oil on canvas, Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo File:The Canal (1894), oil on canvas, 42,4 x 122,5 cm., Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo.jpg, William Degouve de Nuncques, ''The Canal'' (1894), oil on canvas, 42,4 x 122,5 cm., Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo

References

External links

Guggenheim website catalog entry

Museum of Modern Art website catalog entry

Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium website catalog entryAn interactive soundscape (MusIcon) of the painting.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Empire of Lights Paintings by René Magritte 1953 paintings 1954 paintings Peggy Guggenheim Collection