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."