Night

This figure was conceived for the ceiling of a bedroom. Night is a young woman drifting through the sky, bare to the waist, wrapped in heavy dark-blue veils that billow out behind her. With her raised hand she scatters red poppies, the flower long linked with sleep, and in the other she holds a lit torch with a small flame. A thin crescent moon hangs high in a corner among a few stars, while down near the horizon the sky is already paling toward dawn, with low pink clouds strung across it. The Musée d'Orsay dates the canvas only broadly, to somewhere between 1850 and 1855. The French national museums bought it in 1984 from a dealer, the Galerie Joseph Hahn.