The Empire of Light
The Empire of Light (French: "L'Empire des lumières") is the title of a succession of paintings by René Magritte. 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) from the 1940s to the 1960s. 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",and sometimes as plural "The Empire of  Lights". 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, 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 William Degouve de Nuncques (1867 – 1935) as an influence on Magritte's series, specifically his painting "The Blind House". 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. William Rubin 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], 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 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. In 1964, John and Dominique 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 wrote the introduction for the exhibition catalogue and commented  on the Empire of Light" paintings. "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." 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 stands in front of the MacNeil family's house. It also inspired the artwork for the cover of Jackson  Browne's 1974 album "Late for the Sky".