The Sun and Moon Embrace

About this work

Everything turns on the point where the two cheeks touch. The sun is a full, frontal disc, so it holds the middle of the picture firmly, while the crescent sweeps around it from the top right to the bottom like an arm drawn round a shoulder. Both faces have their eyes shut, which gives the scene a private, tender feeling rather than a theatrical one. Fine engraved hatching shapes each cheek, brow and ray, the kind of line an antique celestial print would use, and the ochre tones in the shading keep the gold from looking flat. Around them the midnight navy is sprinkled with small gold stars, and a few larger four-pointed sparkles, at the top right and the bottom left, balance the composition on a diagonal. Close up the hatching reads like a copperplate; from a distance the pair merge into one warm, glowing shape.

Personified sun and moon faces were familiar figures in old almanacs, astronomical charts and alchemical prints, where they went by their Latin names, Sol and Luna. In alchemy the sun stood for gold and the moon for silver, and the two were treated as opposites, hot and cold, day and night, whose union, the coniunctio, symbolised the joining of contraries. The Rosarium philosophorum, printed in Frankfurt in 1550, illustrated that idea with a series of woodcuts showing Sol and Luna as a king and a queen. Astronomy uses the same word in a plainer sense: sun and moon are in conjunction at every new moon, when they share the same direction in the sky. In this picture the meeting is drawn simply as an embrace.

A bedroom is the natural home for this pair. Navy, slate or deep green walls let the gold glow, while a pale wall makes the dark sky stand out as a crisp rectangle. A slim gold frame suits the engraved look; for extra calm, add a wide cream mat. Hang it with Phases of the Golden Moon for a navy and gold celestial pair, or set it beside Golden Impression, Sunrise, where an orange sun rises over a hazy harbour. Warm evening light flatters the ochre shading. Printed from the 7168 × 10752 px file, it stays sharp to about 60 × 90 cm, generous enough above a double bed. A Frame TV version with a gallery mat is included.