Artwork story
About Winter Scene in Moonlight
The artist and artwork
English-born Henry Farrer painted Winter Scene in Moonlight in 1869 with watercolor and opaque gouache on white wove paper. His brother Thomas C. Farrer founded the Society for the Advancement of Truth in Art, representing the Pre-Raphaelite movement in America. Thomas studied with John Ruskin, but Henry was probably self-taught. Starting in the early 1860s, Henry made painstaking still lifes and landscapes and helped found the American Watercolor Society. The Met calls this sheet his earliest known watercolor landscape and suggests that its ordinary terrain probably lay in Brooklyn.
The world around it
Made four years after the Civil War, the picture belongs to an American art world building professional organizations and exhibition venues for watercolor. Farrer's involvement with the American Watercolor Society placed him inside that growth. His precise observation also reflects the American Pre-Raphaelite ideal of truth to nature associated with his brother's circle: an uncelebrated local place could reward the same concentration as a grand subject. A Met comparison credits Farrer with finding latent grandeur in prosaically pastoral scenery.
A detail to notice
The scene gives more room to sky than land. A full moon hangs slightly right of center behind long horizontal clouds, while the snowy ground narrows into dark trees. At far left, one tall leafless trunk leans into the sky and throws a long diagonal shadow across the foreground. A stream or ice channel winds inward toward a small bridge and the moonlit distance. Scattered evergreens interrupt the snow like dark vertical notes, but no person occupies the landscape. The balance feels intentionally unsettled: the moon is off center, the largest tree is pushed to an edge, and the water refuses a direct path. The Met observes that this chill nocturnal setting, subtle asymmetry, and faint primitivism anticipate the disturbing tenor of twentieth-century Surrealist landscapes.
Look closer: materials, scale, and subjects
The recorded object is watercolor made in Watercolor and gouache on white wove paper and held in The American Wing.
Recorded dimensions include 11 7/8 x 15 3/16 in. (30.2 x 38.6 cm).
Subject terms include Moon, Landscapes, Trees, and Winter. Treat them as guideposts, not a complete interpretation.
Collection history and public-domain source
The collection credit line is Purchase, Morris K. Jesup Fund, Martha and Barbara Fleischman, and Katherine and Frank Martucci Gifts, 1999.
The individual artwork page and official image were verified as Public Domain on 2026-08-23.
No Context Gallery independently uses the public-domain image. The source museum has not endorsed, sponsored, or affiliated itself with these products.
Research sources
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