Josephine’s Moonlight, Coolgardie offers a quiet counterpoint to its companion piece, Sunlight, Coolgardie. Where the latter captures the town’s heat and harsh brightness, Moonlight shows a softer, more introspective side of the goldfields: a lonely cottage lit from within, surrounded by shadowy trees under a cobalt sky.
Painted during her 1897 visit to Coolgardie, this work is part of the series described by the West Australian Goldfields Courier, which noted Josephine was capturing ‘sunset effects round about Coolgardie in which camels and Afghans may play a picturesque part.’1 Though camels don’t appear here, the sense of a vast and isolating landscape remains.
Together, this pair of paintings Josephine’s skill in rendering light.
Moonlight, Coolgardie was exhibited as part of Josephine’s solo retrospective at the Athenaeum Gallery in 1943.
Image courtesy of Leonard Joel.
