Frances Elizabeth Fryatt

“ Now his wife's fanciful challenge awakened a desire to paint the moon in colors; for, as the most exquisite portrait in black and white can not express the bloom of lip and cheek, or the burnished gold of sunny tresses, neither could the various astronomical drawings now in existence express the beautiful gradations of light, the delicate tinting of the gray-green plains, the brilliant peaks and sunlit edge that make the telescopic moon the most interesting of celestial bodies. ”

“ FROM the remotest periods of which we have quoted or written records, the moon has been an object of adoring and speculative contemplation. As the babe in the cradle, crowing and smiling, stretches out its tiny hands to grasp the shining flame of the distant candle, so the infant races of the world gazed at the radiant orb above them, seeking to grasp and penetrate its mystic beauties. ”

“ These marine bottoms are not smooth in reality, but are seamed and traversed by ranges of hills and mountains, and craters thousands of feet deep! Did these, like monster mouths, swallow the remnants of the evaporating oceans?
The longer one studies this lonely globe, so beautiful in its desolation, the more real does it become to the eye. Here rise veritable mountains casting their black shadows on the plains. There stretch deserts thousands of miles in length, visible throughout all their breadth, for there is little if any perspective on the moon. ”

“ These drifts, as of snow, are ranges of mountains, and the promontories and pendent stars are crags and mountaintops just catching the rays of dawn. Down their steep sides lie the shadows of night; the topmost peaks alone have caught the glory! And beyond is the night-side of the moon, illumined by dim earthlight. ”

“ Slowly—for eighteen months rolled by before the first phase was finished—pencil and pigment, guided by artist eye and hand, did their work, and there stood a faithful portrait of the three-days-old crescent, twenty-one inches in diameter, showing the terminator at Messier.
The edge toward the left is brilliantly illuminated by the sun, whose proximity casts a yellowish tint over the plains, that gradually fades into grayish-green in the shadows of night on the right edge or terminator. ”

“ Six hundred years later, Plutarch supported the views of his ancient predecessor; but it was not until the application of the first telescope that any certain knowledge of the planet was gained. This instrument caused a complete revolution of ideas in astronomy. Galileo's plains, mountains, and valleys, were facts, whereas those of Anaxagoras had been matters of conjecture. Imagination soon peopled the moon with a peculiar race of beings, covered it with grand forests and cities, and all that pertains to a habitable world. ”

“ It may be fairly asked how the artist, contending with so many difficulties, could paint a faithful portrait at all. As it would be impossible in the moon's short sittings, if one may use the term, to catch and fix accurately the varied details that crowd its surface with the pencil alone, Mr. Harrison resorted, as a first step, to photographic aid. Taking Rutherfurd's negative of the three-days-old crescent, he enlarged it to the desired size by means of an oxyhydrogen light, throwing the image from the glass to his canvas. ”

“ Here they are, brilliant as ever; but we can learn nothing of their nature by gazing at them. The astronomer will tell you the latest theory—namely, that when the moon's crust was cooling, ages ago, it contracted, causing immense corrugations, wrinkles, and nodules, and in many places deep rents, admitting water to the heated nucleus, producing volcanic action; in many of these fissures rose up molten matter, filling the central openings to the brim, and extending all the length of the cracks.
You have already noticed that besides the craters there are innumerable craterlets. ”

“ Nor is it to be marveled at, when we consider that this planet was the most brilliant and changeable, as well as the nearest and apparently largest celestial body that presented itself to their nightly view, and that in the clear, exquisite ether of Arabian skies, and the calm nights of India and Egypt, it shone among the heavenly host with a luster unknown to dwellers in the crowded cities of a northern clime. ”

“ Nothing varies the monotony of the long days and nights composing the lunar year, save the changing positions of the intensely black shadows falling from hills and mountains that cut off or fling back into space the white light of the sun ”

“ When completed, this series of paintings will present not only a worn-out world in miniature, but, if one may credit the great astronomers of our day, the painted prophecy of the far-off future of our own earth, when it shall have cooled off, and all the bustling, battling throngs of humanity be as its own clay! ”

“ A German astronomer proposed the building of an immense triangle on the plains of Siberia as a means of mathematical correspondence with the moon's inhabitants, believing they would build one in reply. A brother scientist, commenting on this novel signal-service, naïvely declared that "many more foolish projects had been carried out successfully."
Improved instruments have demonstrated that life, as we understand it, is impossible on the lunar body, revealing to us that it is composed of rocks and matter of a highly reflective character ”

“ The southern portion of the moon is a mass of old craters, ring-plains, valleys, hills, and ridges; with its radiant streak system and diversity of formations it is the most interesting part of the lunar surface. ”

“ But, ho! what tracks are these like the footprints of huge camels? Has some celestial caravan passed this way and disappeared from sight in the far south? Shall we see another wending its slow way after? ”

“ Although Father Riccioli, of Bologna, published a chart in 1651, and Dominic Cassini another in 1680, fuller as to detail, Hevelius's chart was considered the best authority for one hundred years after its issue, his knowledge of drawing contributing greatly to its success. ”