From the Ceiling in Nefertari's tomb (XIII sec. a.C.) to mosaics and frescos like Giotto’s ceiling in the Cappella degli Scrovegni representing the celestial vault and the transit of the Halley comet in 1301, to Monet, Van Gogh, Chagall, Munch, Balla and the futurists, Magritte and Anselm Kiefer (just to mention a few) starry nights have been protagonists of artistic expressions. In one way or the other. Fireflies though have been depicted more rarely, and mostly in Japanese culture.
I was interrupted precisely by the work that a new painting of the outside of a café in the evening has been giving me these past few days. On the terrace, there are little figures of people drinking. A huge yellow lantern lights the terrace, the façade, the pavement, and even projects light over the cobblestones of the street, which takes on a violet-pink tinge. The gables of the houses on a street that leads away under the blue sky studded with stars are dark blue or violet, with a green tree. Now there’s a painting of night without black. With nothing but beautiful blue, violet and green, and in these surroundings the lighted square is coloured pale sulphur, lemon green. I enormously enjoy painting on the spot at night. In the past they used to draw, and paint the picture from the drawing in the daytime. But I find that it suits me to paint the thing straightaway. It’s quite true that I may take a blue for a green in the dark, a blue lilac for a pink lilac, since you can’t make out the nature of the tone clearly. But it’s the only way of getting away from the conventional black night with a poor, pallid and whitish light, while in fact a mere candle by itself gives us the richest yellows and oranges.
(vangoghletters.org. Letter 678 to his sister Wilhelmina)
In Japanese culture artists depicted adult fireflies in the absence or presence of people, and ranged from realistic-looking insects to yellow-colored or golden dots. Some fireflies appeared to be generalized insects or resembled butterflies, or were more abstract, such as a blotch or the letter ‘X’. However, in other pieces the insects were clearly fireflies. Several pieces, including multiple works by Zeshin, had a few non-glowing fireflies flying or at rest, usually outdoors in the daytime surrounded by white space or in still-lifes. A second group of paintings and prints depicted fireflies—often dozens of them—at night near water. These night scenes had muted gray or black color palettes, which highlighted the fireflies’ reddish body parts and luminescence.
Here are two examples of depiction of fireflies.
In the first image Fireflies Over the Uji River by Moonlight (detail).
Meiji period (1868–1912). Suzuki Shōnen (Japanese, 1849–1918). Painting, hanging scroll; ink, color, and gold on silk. Purchase, Gift of Mrs. Russell Sage, by exchange, 1979. Accession Number: 1979.72. The Metropolian Museum of Art, New York, USA, www.metmuseum.org (accessed 4 January 2022). Open access image, CC0.
The second image contains two pictures: the first depicts a mother and a child catching fireflies, while the second shows a person just viewing them. The Metropolian Museum of Art, New York, USA, Open access images, CC0. (a). Woman and Child Catching Fireflies. ca. 1793. Eishōsai Chōki (Japanese, active late 18th–early 19th C.). Woodblock print; ink and color on paper. H.O. Havemeyer Collection, Bequest of Mrs. H.O. Havemeyer, 1929. (b). Modern Genji—Firefly Viewing (Imayō genji shiken hotaru asobi); 1961, Toyohara Kunichika, (Japanese, 1835–1900). Central sheet of a triptych; woodblock print, ink and color on paper.
When it comes to fine arts, I will just show works of Balla and van Gogh – as they depict the first cases of light pollution or rather utilisation of artificial light. It serves my wish to show the development of light pollution during the industrial era.
As Maura Gleeson points out in her article on Monet (https://smarthistory.org/claude-monets-impression-sunrise/) Artists who painted en plein air were influenced by new tools for art-making that developed as a result of the Industrial Revolution. John Rand’s collapsible paint tube, for example, changed the way paint could be stored. For centuries, artists had preserved their expensive pigments in pig’s bladders, but they were unable to be sealed, which meant that paint was sometimes wasted. The collapsible paint tube not only solved this problem because artists could open and close them with a cap, but they also improved the portability of materials. The canvases they painted out in the world were no longer preliminary sketches or studies, but the finished work of art.
Included a small sketch of a 30 square canvas, in short the starry sky painted by night, actually under a gas jet. The sky is aquamarine, the water is royal blue, the ground is mauve. The town is blue and purple. The gas is yellow and the reflections are russet gold descending down to green-bronze. On the aquamarine field of the sky the Great Bear is a sparkling green and pink, whose discreet paleness contrasts with the brutal gold of the gas.
(vangoghletters.org. Letter 543 to his brother Theo)
At last I have a landscape with olive trees, and also a new study of a starry sky
(vangoghletters.org. Letter 782 to his brother Theo)
Between 1888 and 1889 Vincent van Gogh painted three of his most famous paintings in which he depicted night skies: the first one in which he used starry backgrounds was Café Terrace at Night, followed by The Starry Night over the Rhône, and then The Starry Night.
All three painting represent an era of transition, and van Gogh is capturing both the glittering colors of the night sky and the artificial lighting that was new to the era.
This image above was created with OPENART (openart.ai) and the prompt was "take away street light and leave only the moon and the stars", as I wanted to creatively reverse Balla's message and turn off the lampion and just let the moon and the stars shine.
Dated 1909 on the painting itself, futurist Giacomo Balla has created an oeuvre that is significantly depicting an hommage to artificial light. The moon and the night sky are glamorously eaten up by the light eradiated by the street lampion.
In his book The End of Night / Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artficial Light, Paul Bogard dedicates a couple of pages to juxtaposing van Gogh's Starry Night and Balla's Street Light.
I love the story Van Gogh's painting tells, of a small dark town, a few yellow-orange gaslights in house windows, under a giant swirling and waving blue-green sky. This is a painting of our world from before night had been pushed back to the forests and the seas, from back when sleepy towns slept without streetlights. (...) While Van Gogh certainly had his troubles, this paiting looks as it does in part because it is of a time that no longer exists, a time when the night sky would have looked a lot more like this. Does Van Gogh use his imagination? Of course-he's said to have painted the scene in his asylum cell at St. Remy from studies he'd done outside and from memory - but this is an imagined sky inspired by a real sky of a kind few of the fifty million MoMA visitors have ever seen (ndr - the paiting is exposed at MoMA). It's an imagined sky inspired by the real sky over a town much darker than the towns we live in today.(...) Van Gogh lived in a time before electric light. In a letter from the summer of 1888, he described what he'd seen while walking a southern French beach:
The deep blue sky was flecked with clouds of a blue deeper than the fundamental blue of intense cobalt, and others of a clearer blue, like the blue whiteness of the Milky Way. In the blue depth the stars were sparkling, greenish, yellow, white, pink, more brilliant, more sparkling gemlike than at home - even in Paris: opals you might call them, emeralds, lapis lazuli, rubies, sapphires.
It is remarkable to modern eyes, that Van Gogh would reference the stars over Paris: no one has seen a sky remotely close to this over Paris for at least fifty years. (...)
Even on a clear dark night the human eye struggles to notice these different colors because it works with two kinds of light receptors: rods and cones. The cones are the color sensors, but they don't respond to faint illumination. The rods are more finely attuned to dim light, but they don't discriminate colors. When we look at a starry sky, the sensitive but color-blind rods do most of the work, and so the stars appear mostly white. Add to this that we seldom stay outside long enough for our eyes to adapt to the dark, and then the fact that most of us live with a sky deafened by light pollution, and the idea that stars come in different colors seems wildly impossible (...) Gaze long enough in a place dark enough that the stars stand in clear three-dimensional beauty, and you will spot flashes of red, green, yellow, orange and blue.
Paul Bogard continues with his encounter with Giacomo Balla's painting, that is not even exposed at MoMA.
For me, the fact MoMA has its view of a starry night on display every hour of every day, while this brilliantly colorful painting of an electric streetlight is hidden in backroom shadows, is deliciously ironic. This may be the only place in New York City where the streetlight has been put away while the starry night continues to shine.
(...) In both paintings, the moon lives in the upper right corner, and for Van Gogh, the moon is a throbbing yellow presence pulsing with natural light. But for Balla, the moon has become a little wafer hanging on for dear life, overwhelmed by the electric streetlight. And that, in fact, was Balla's purpose. "Let's kill the moonlight!" was the rallying cry from Balla's fellow italian futurist, Filippo Marinetti. These futurists believed in noise and speed and light - human light, modern light, electric light. (...) On a canvas three times the size of The Starry Night, with a background of darkness painted sea blue-green and brown, the electric lamp radiates rose-mauve-green-yellow in upside-down Vs. The lamppost is a candy cane of those same colors, while concentric circles of the colourful Vs reverberate with resonant light. Here is an optimistic vision of what electricity would mean, not only a night brighter than we'd known but one more beautiful as well. Indeed, were this what electric lighting had eventually come to be, Balla's reverence would be absolutely understandable even in our day. (...) And so here (at the MoMA), fifty meters apart, hang to paintings that span a bridge of time when night began to change from something few of us have ever known into the night we know so well we do not even notice it anymore. Done in the southern French countryside at the end of the 19th century, Van Gogh's is a painting of old night. Done in the city at the start of the 20th century, Balla's is a painting of night from now on. With time, electric lights like the one Balla portrayed would spread across western Europe and North America, perhaps inspiring the popularity of Van Gogh's painting as they did: As we lost our view of our own starry night, our view of his became more and more fantastic - this old night he had known and loved and experienced by gaslight.
