That moonlight isn't real. Every drop of it is oil paint... It's called A Moonlit Lane, and it was painted by John Atkinson Grimshaw in 1874. A full moon hangs behind bare, tangled branches, the road below still wet from the rain, and every puddle and wall and dark hedge holds a little of that cold silver light. You can almost feel the chill in the air and hear the silence of the street... The man who painted it was born in a cramped terraced house in Leeds, worked as a clerk for the railway, and taught himself almost everything he knew. At twenty-four, to his parents' horror, he quit his job to paint. He even borrowed from photography, projecting scenes onto his canvas with lenses, and some of his contemporaries sneered that the results showed no marks of handling or brushwork, as if that were a flaw rather than an artistic miracle... But the painter who mattered most saw it differently: James McNeill Whistler, the man famous for his own night paintings, came to visit him and admitted: "I considered myself the inventor of nocturnes until I saw Grimmy's moonlit pictures."

Zoom in on this image. It's not a photograph. It's called Moonrise, painted in oil in 1884 by Polish artist Stanisław Masłowski, and it hangs in the National Museum in Kraków. It shows almost nothing: a wide, dark sky, a still stretch of water, a low bank of sand, a few bare trees. And just above the horizon, the golden moon, half hidden behind a streak of grey cloud, laying a single ribbon of gold light down across the water toward you. What makes it extraordinary is that it depicts one of the hardest things a painter can attempt: near-darkness. Most of the canvas is dim, and dim light has almost no color and almost no contrast to work with, one wrong value and the whole thing goes muddy or flat. Masłowski handled that faint light so precisely that the scene glows exactly the way a real night does. He was only about thirty when he painted it.