Midnight (1891): Art, History and Details

Midnight (1891) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Jean-Charles Cazin (French, 1841–1901).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

This painting depicts Abbeville, a city in northern France famous for its canals and architecture. It lies near the seaport of Boulogne-sur-Mer, Cazin's hometown and where he spent the last decades of his life painting the countryside, beaches, and nearby towns. Cazin specialized in landscapes, often influenced by his knowledge of English and Dutch painters. The title, Midnight, and the image itself suggest silence and stillness—Cazin's hallmarks—but only rarely did he attain this almost surrealistic atmosphere. Cazin was educated in Paris at the famous Ecole Gratuite de Dessins (Free School of Drawing), an innovative and unorthodox institution teaching drawing from memory. He studied there with fellow artists Henri Fantin-Latour (1836–1904), Auguste Rodin (1840–1917), and Alphonse Legros (1837–1911). They all shared an interest in Symbolism—the movement that sees symbols in reality and perceives reality through symbols.

Object facts

• Title: Midnight
• Date: 1891
• Creator attribution: Jean-Charles Cazin (French, 1841–1901)
• Culture: France, 19th century
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on fabric
• Dimensions: Framed: 113 x 112.4 x 11.4 cm (44 1/2 x 44 1/4 x 4 1/2 in.); Unframed: 88 x 89 cm (34 5/8 x 35 1/16 in.)
• Collection: Mod Euro - Painting 1800-1960
• Department: Modern European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1923.602

A detail from the museum

Cazin preferred to paint in his studio using memory techniques learned in his artistic training which he later passed on to his own students.

Collection credit

The Charles W. Harkness Gift

Further reading listed by the museum

• "Bequest of Mrs. Charles W. Harkness." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 4, no. 4 (1917): 63.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1925.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1928.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.