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The "Serious Moonlight" of Albert Pinkham Ryder
The painter created moody portraits of night skies
Farouk El-Baz was part of the team behind NASA’s successful 1969 Apollo 11 mission to the moon.
In a talk a half century later, the scientist pondered about the persisting lure of Earth’s neighbor on our imagination.
People for thousands of years have studied the moon, with some even making it into a deity, El-Baz said in a 2019 talk at the U.S. National Air and Space Museum.
“All the way throughout history, the moon had a position in the human mind,” El-Baz said.
I came across this engaging talk while doing research on the 1969 Apollo mission. (There are links at the end of this essay to my sources.)
The comments from El-Baz made me think about paintings by Albert Pinkham Ryder (1847–1917). I also think of Ryder when I hear David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance,” where he sings about the “serious moonlight.”
The moon captivated Ryder
A sea captain named John Robinson wrote an essay about his friend Ryder, recalling how when his ship was in port in…
