Explore the Precursors, influences, and origins of this artwork.
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.: 65 p. : 126 p.    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.: 126 p.  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).": 182–184 p.  Comparisons with Salvador Dalí'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),: 126–127 p.  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.
Max Ernst Caspar David Friedrich William Rubin Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen Max Ernst's Salvador Dalí frottage symbolist John William Degouve de Nuncques Salvador Dalí's Victorian era John Atkinson Grimshaw Kröller-Müller Museum Menil Collection