From ancient landscape to modern art · Dawn, twilight and horizon

This collection spans centuries and styles to show how dawn and dusk transform landscapes, cities, figures and seas.

Sunrise and sunset offer painters a moment of transition where shapes, colors and distances change rapidly. In the classical landscape, light organizes space and gives the story a precise time. Romanticism seeks the sublime, immensity or meditation. The Impressionists directly paint the fleeting variations of the atmosphere, while the Symbolists and Expressionists use twilight to translate worry, desire or solitude. Marines, cities, countryside and mythological figures gathered here show that the luminous horizon is never a simple effect: it becomes a structure, a climate and sometimes the real subject from the table. The "Sunsets and Sunrises" selection notably compares Twilight and City at Twilight (La Petite Ville II). Its reading favors the atmosphere.

Between day and night, the landscape ceases to be stable: each painter chooses what he lets disappear and what the light still reveals.