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Lot Essay
Filled with a rich sense of mystery that confounds and beguiles in equal measure, René Magritte’s L’empire des lumières of 1954 is a powerful example of the artist’s extraordinary, mature Surrealist vision. Focusing on the juxtaposition of a landscape bathed in deep shadows with the blue expanse of a day-lit sky above, this seemingly impossible collision of day and night in a single moment quickly became one of his most celebrated and iconic subjects. Between 1949 and 1964, the artist created a total of seventeen versions in oil, with several more iterations in gouache, on the theme of the L’empire des lumières. Each subtly different from the next, with intriguing variations and diversions from canvas to canvas, these paintings demonstrate Magritte’s endless spirit of invention, as he probed the rich poetic potential of his deceptively simple subjects.
As Magritte explained, the power of works such as L’empire des lumières lay in transforming the familiar, everyday world in unexpected ways: “For me it’s not a matter of painting ‘reality’ as though it were readily accessible to me and to others, but of depicting the most ordinary reality in such a way that this immediate reality loses its tame or terrifying character and presents itself with mystery” (quoted in H. Torczyner, Magritte: Ideas and Images, New York, 1977, p. 203). Executed with a precision and attention to detail that only reinforces the uncanniness of the scene, the L’empire des lumières paintings offer an elegant summation of Magritte’s unique form of Surrealism, reveling in a game of unexpected contradictions, in which all is familiar and yet ultimately strange and the ordinary is rendered extraordinary.
The idea behind the L’empire des lumières series appears to have been percolating in Magritte’s mind for several years prior to his first painting on the theme. While staying with the collector Edward James in London during the spring of 1937, Magritte gave a presentation at Roland Penrose’s London Gallery in which he discussed “certain features peculiar to words, images and real objects” (quoted in D. Sylvester, op. cit., 1993, vol. III, p. 53). In one example early in the discussion, the artist cited the opening line of André Breton’s poem L’Aigrette (from Terre de clair, 1923): “If only the sun would shine tonight” (ibid.). The following year, the artist created a gouache entitled Le Poison (Sylvester, no. 1142; Museum Boijmans-Van Beuningen, Rotterdam) in which a row of buildings took on the appearance of the night sky, dotted with constellations of stars and a delicate crescent moon, transforming the bricks and mortar streetscape into an evocative, otherworldly vision of the cosmos.
In this way, Le Poison was a continuation of Magritte’s different translations and juxtapositions of the sky, which was a recurring character in his work, its familiarity allowing him to investigate the world of appearances, and question our understanding of its properties. While paintings such as Les muscles célestes (Sylvester, no. 166; Private collection) explored the physicality and presence of the sky, and L’ombre céleste (Sylvester, no. 168; Private collection) transformed it into a flat piece of stage scenery, it most frequently appeared as a framed picture within Magritte’s oeuvre. In these works, a little segment of the vast blue expanse, dotted with clouds, has been magically captured and condensed into a small, portable object, as in Les perfections célestes (Sylvester, no. 329; Private collection), Le Salon de Monsieur Goulden (Sylvester, no. 300; Private collection) and Le palais de rideaux (Sylvester, no. 305; The Museum of Modern Art, New York). In other works, Magritte used the ubiquitous sight to generate impossible scenarios, as in his famed oiseau de ciel, a magical bird, captured mid-flight, which appears to be cut from the sky itself, its body filled with a pale blue sky and soft, fluffy clouds.
In the L’empire des lumières paintings, the sky is once again an essential tool in Magritte’s elegant disruption of our understanding of the world around us. With these works he adopts a subtle evocation of the dichotomy of night and day, simplifying the concept explored in Le Poison to create a composition that is all the more unsettling for its quiet strangeness. The first work in the series to be completed (Sylvester, no. 709; Private collection) depicts a quiet, suburban street scene with eerily shuttered houses, some curtained windows faintly lit from within, and a single lamppost, shining forth like a beacon, the sole illumination along this darkened length of avenue. Above, the sky remains in its natural position, untouched by unexpected cracks or objects, but rather than a scattering of stars, broad daylight and white clouds fill the pale blue expanse. While at first glance the painting appears to simply present the crepuscular light of dusk, on further inspection the deep shadows and soft glow of the streetlamp suggests the sky exists in an alternate timeline to the rest of the scene. In this way, the painting pivots on the construction of a somewhat familiar, yet impossible scenario that forces us, the viewer, to examine and question our own expectations.
While the painting was quickly purchased by Nelson A. Rockefeller in New York, the image lived on in Magritte’s imagination, and had a profound impact on his own conception of reality: “After I had painted L’empire des lumières,” the artist explained in 1966, “I got the idea that night and day exist together, that they are one. This is reasonable, or at the very least it’s in keeping with our knowledge: in the world night always exists at the same time as day. (Just as sadness always exists in some people at the same time as happiness in others). But such ideas are not poetic. What is poetic is the visible image of the picture” (quoted in S. Whitfield, Magritte, exh. cat., The Hayward Gallery, London, 1992, no. 111).
The artist’s friend Paul Nougé, the leader of the Brussels Surrealist group, is reported to have provided the title for the motif, for which the most appropriate English translation is “The Dominion of Light.” “English, Flemish, and German translators take [dominion] in the sense of ‘territory’,” Nougé noted, “whereas the fundamental meaning is obviously ‘power’, ‘dominance’” (quoted in D. Sylvester, op. cit., 1993, vol. III, p. 145). Nougé was undoubtedly sensitive to Magritte’s conviction that his paintings never expressed a singular idea, but rather were a form of stimulus that created new thoughts in the mind of the viewer. “Titles play an important part in Magritte’s paintings,” stated the poet, “but it is not the part one might be tempted to imagine. The title isn’t a program to be carried out. It comes after the picture. It’s as if it were its confirmation, and it often constitutes an exemplary manifestation of the efficacy of the image. This is why it doesn’t matter whether the title occurs to the painter himself afterwards, or is found by someone else who has an understanding of his painting. I am quite well placed to know that it is almost never Magritte who invents the titles of his pictures. His paintings could do without titles, and that is why it has sometimes been said that on the whole the title is no more than a conversational gambit” (quoted in exh. cat., op. cit., 1992, p. 39).
Magritte discussed the idea behind his L’empire des lumières paintings in a commentary written for a 1956 television program, later published in the exhibition catalogue Peintres belges de l’imaginaire, in 1972: “For me, the conception of a picture is an idea of one thing or of several things which can be realized visually in my painting. Obviously, all ideas are not ideas for paintings. Naturally, an idea must be sufficiently stimulating for me to get down to painting the thing or things that inspired the idea. The conception of a painting, that is, the idea, is not visible in the painting: an idea cannot be seen by the eyes. What is depicted in the painting is what is visible to the eye, the thing or things that had to inspire the idea. So, in the painting L’empire des lumières are things I had an idea about—to be precise, a nocturnal landscape and a sky above in broad daylight. The landscape evokes night and the sky evokes day. This evocation of day and night seems to me to have the power to surprise and enchant us. I call this power ‘poetry.’ I believe this evocation has such a ‘poetic’ power because, among other reasons, I have always been keenly interested in night and in day, although I’ve never had a preference for one or the other. This intense personal interest in night and day is a feeling of admiration and astonishment” (quoted in K. Rooney and E. Plattner, eds., René Magritte: Selected Writings, trans. J. Levy, Richmond, 2016, p. 167).
To this day, L’empire des lumières serves as a powerful illustration of his extraordinary ability to deploy symbols of a normal, ordinary, conventional life to contradictory ends: to surprise, unsettle and reconfigure the viewer’s expectations and thus, their experience of everyday reality. It was an aspect of the L’empire des lumières series that André Breton recognized as inherently Surrealist in spirit, stating: “To [Magritte], inevitably, fell the task of separating the ‘subtle’ from the ‘dense,’ without which effort no transmutation is possible. To attack this problem called for all his audacity—to extract simultaneously what is light from the shadow and what is shadow from the light (l’empire des lumières). In this work the violence done to accepted ideas and conventions is such (I have this from Magritte) that most of those who go by quickly think they saw the stars in the daytime sky. In Magritte’s entire performance there is present to a high degree what Apollinaire called ‘genuine good sense, which is, of course, that of the great poets’” (“The Breadth of Rene Magritte,” in Magritte, exh. cat., Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock, 1964, n.p.).
The idea proved incredibly popular with the artist’s collectors, leading to a number of direct commissions for new versions. However, Magritte was adamant that each work should evolve naturally from his own artistic pondering, writing to his dealer Alexander Iolas “I have to find a way of justifying the replica in my own mind” (quoted in C. Greenberg and D. Pih, eds., Magritte A-Z, London, 2011, p. 49). As a result, Magritte actively sought alterations between each variation, in nuance and motif, which allowed him to expand and enhance the poetic effect of the scene. Similarly, changes to the size of the canvases, alternating as well between horizontal and vertical formats, enabled the viewer to experience the impact of the juxtaposition in different ways. As Siegfried Gohr has highlighted, by repeating and reinterpreting the theme, Magritte was “arranging and rearranging visual elements until they produced a shock like a blow from a boxer’s glove—whose force, however, remained purely visual and mental” (in Magritte, exh. cat., San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2000, p. 17).
The second version of the L’empire des lumières theme (Sylvester, no. 723; The Museum of Modern Art, New York) was painted in June 1950, on a larger sized canvas, allowing a broader array of building façades to populate the scene. Though Magritte told Iolas he had “revealed the full strength of the idea” in this composition, he continued to revisit the L’empire des lumières motif multiple times over the course of the following fifteen years, in what may be considered Magritte’s only exploration of working in series (quoted in D. Sylvester, op. cit., 1993, vol. III, p. 157). In each iteration he made subtle alterations, experimenting with the particulars of the scene, amplifying different aspects of the landscape, subtly adjusting the colors of the sky or the density of the clouds, even expanding the sense of space and recession within the picture. Different architectural styles were portrayed in some versions, providing unexpected hints as to the location of the setting, or the socio-economic status of the residents, while the towering trees that surround the building began to take on a distinct sense of individuality and character from one canvas to the next. However, it was the extraordinary duality of night and day that remained at the heart of the L’empire des lumières paintings, a phenomenon to which the viewer appears to be the only witness.
Magritte created the present L’empire des lumières under unusual circumstances, driven in part by his growing renown and public appeal. On 19 June 1954, the Venice Biennale opened to the public. Discussing his visit to the event, Douglas Cooper explained the central organizing principle that lay behind the grand exhibition: “For the first time, the secretary-general had attempted to give the Biennale a certain coherence; having decided that the Presidenza would undertake special exhibitions of Arp, Ernst and Miró, he asked his committee of experts to persuade the national commissaries to take ‘Fantastic Art’ as a theme for their pavilions” (D. Cooper, “Reflections on the Venice Biennale” in The Burlington Magazine, vol. 96, no. 619, October 1954, p. 318). While this dedicated showcase was intended to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Surrealism, in reality the selection of artists across the Biennale was much more diverse than just those directly associated with the movement, and included works by Henri Matisse, Kees van Dongen, Paul Klee, Edvard Munch, Lucio Fontana and Nicolas De Staël.
In the Belgian Pavilion, the organizers took the decision to showcase the many different explorations of the fantastic theme across several centuries, featuring paintings by Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Huys alongside those of James Ensor and Paul Delvaux. The centerpiece of their exhibition was a mini-retrospective of Magritte’s work, featuring twenty-four paintings, ranging from his earliest engagements with the Parisian Surrealists in 1926, right up to his most recent work from the opening months of 1954. The display was in fact a condensed version of the large Magritte exhibition staged at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels in May of the same year, which had featured a carefully selected array of the artist’s most important and recognizable works. Among the most popular pieces on view at the Biennale was the enormous L’empire des lumières (Sylvester, no. 804; The Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice), which was matched in its scale by only two other works in the Venice show—L’assassin menacé (Sylvester, no. 137; The Museum of Modern Art, New York) and Le monde invisible (Sylvester, no. 805; The Menil Collection, Houston). The painting caught the eye of the illustrious collector Peggy Guggenheim, who began to make inquiries about the possibility of purchasing L’empire des lumières.
However, the painting had already been promised to three other interested parties, and suddenly Magritte found himself with the unprecedented dilemma of having sold the same painting multiple times over. In a letter to Jan-Albert Goris from mid-July, the artist explained the predicament: “It is quite complicated from certain points of view: two big pictures on show at the Venice Biennale, and one of which was ‘reserved’ by a collector here and by the [Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts in Brussels]. I have just heard that the Museum has made up its mind (too late, unfortunately), and wants to buy ‘The Dominion of Light.’ As I was in a state of uncertainty, and as I hadn’t committed myself to refuse sales of pictures about which there had already been some financial discussion, and as, in addition, [Alexander] Iolas paid me a flying visit late at night, it was difficult for me to please everybody…” (letter to Goris, 21 July 1954; quoted in D. Sylvester, op. cit., 1993, vol. III, p. 55). In the end, Guggenheim proved to be the lucky bidder, securing the large canvas for her esteemed collection.
As a result, Magritte arranged to create three more versions of the L’empire des lumières subject for each of the disappointed parties, all of which were completed by the end of the year. While the painting intended for Iolas (Sylvester, no. 814; The Menil Collection, Houston) was created on a canvas 130 x 95 cm, the other two from this group—the present work, made for the Belgian collector Willy van Hove, and the example for the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts in Brussels—were executed on a slightly larger scale, both standing at 146 x 114 cm (Sylvester, nos. 809 and 810). With these works, Magritte began to expand upon the mysterious, uncanny atmosphere of the scene, adding the shimmering surface of a canal or riverway to the foreground. This marked the first time that the artist had introduced a body of water to the scene, and the rippling reflections lend a new dimension to the imagery, the points of light within the nocturnal scene suddenly doubled. In the present example, the glow from the singular lamppost is softened, granting the composition a greater sense of warmth, which is echoed in the subtle illumination from the windows in the upper story of the house. As a result, the reflections in the water are more clearly discernible to the viewer, the outlines of the lamppost and the windows crisper as they appear mirrored in the canal’s surface, creating the impression that perhaps another world hovers on the very edge of our own.
As Magritte explained, the power of works such as L’empire des lumières lay in transforming the familiar, everyday world in unexpected ways: “For me it’s not a matter of painting ‘reality’ as though it were readily accessible to me and to others, but of depicting the most ordinary reality in such a way that this immediate reality loses its tame or terrifying character and presents itself with mystery” (quoted in H. Torczyner, Magritte: Ideas and Images, New York, 1977, p. 203). Executed with a precision and attention to detail that only reinforces the uncanniness of the scene, the L’empire des lumières paintings offer an elegant summation of Magritte’s unique form of Surrealism, reveling in a game of unexpected contradictions, in which all is familiar and yet ultimately strange and the ordinary is rendered extraordinary.
The idea behind the L’empire des lumières series appears to have been percolating in Magritte’s mind for several years prior to his first painting on the theme. While staying with the collector Edward James in London during the spring of 1937, Magritte gave a presentation at Roland Penrose’s London Gallery in which he discussed “certain features peculiar to words, images and real objects” (quoted in D. Sylvester, op. cit., 1993, vol. III, p. 53). In one example early in the discussion, the artist cited the opening line of André Breton’s poem L’Aigrette (from Terre de clair, 1923): “If only the sun would shine tonight” (ibid.). The following year, the artist created a gouache entitled Le Poison (Sylvester, no. 1142; Museum Boijmans-Van Beuningen, Rotterdam) in which a row of buildings took on the appearance of the night sky, dotted with constellations of stars and a delicate crescent moon, transforming the bricks and mortar streetscape into an evocative, otherworldly vision of the cosmos.
In this way, Le Poison was a continuation of Magritte’s different translations and juxtapositions of the sky, which was a recurring character in his work, its familiarity allowing him to investigate the world of appearances, and question our understanding of its properties. While paintings such as Les muscles célestes (Sylvester, no. 166; Private collection) explored the physicality and presence of the sky, and L’ombre céleste (Sylvester, no. 168; Private collection) transformed it into a flat piece of stage scenery, it most frequently appeared as a framed picture within Magritte’s oeuvre. In these works, a little segment of the vast blue expanse, dotted with clouds, has been magically captured and condensed into a small, portable object, as in Les perfections célestes (Sylvester, no. 329; Private collection), Le Salon de Monsieur Goulden (Sylvester, no. 300; Private collection) and Le palais de rideaux (Sylvester, no. 305; The Museum of Modern Art, New York). In other works, Magritte used the ubiquitous sight to generate impossible scenarios, as in his famed oiseau de ciel, a magical bird, captured mid-flight, which appears to be cut from the sky itself, its body filled with a pale blue sky and soft, fluffy clouds.
In the L’empire des lumières paintings, the sky is once again an essential tool in Magritte’s elegant disruption of our understanding of the world around us. With these works he adopts a subtle evocation of the dichotomy of night and day, simplifying the concept explored in Le Poison to create a composition that is all the more unsettling for its quiet strangeness. The first work in the series to be completed (Sylvester, no. 709; Private collection) depicts a quiet, suburban street scene with eerily shuttered houses, some curtained windows faintly lit from within, and a single lamppost, shining forth like a beacon, the sole illumination along this darkened length of avenue. Above, the sky remains in its natural position, untouched by unexpected cracks or objects, but rather than a scattering of stars, broad daylight and white clouds fill the pale blue expanse. While at first glance the painting appears to simply present the crepuscular light of dusk, on further inspection the deep shadows and soft glow of the streetlamp suggests the sky exists in an alternate timeline to the rest of the scene. In this way, the painting pivots on the construction of a somewhat familiar, yet impossible scenario that forces us, the viewer, to examine and question our own expectations.
While the painting was quickly purchased by Nelson A. Rockefeller in New York, the image lived on in Magritte’s imagination, and had a profound impact on his own conception of reality: “After I had painted L’empire des lumières,” the artist explained in 1966, “I got the idea that night and day exist together, that they are one. This is reasonable, or at the very least it’s in keeping with our knowledge: in the world night always exists at the same time as day. (Just as sadness always exists in some people at the same time as happiness in others). But such ideas are not poetic. What is poetic is the visible image of the picture” (quoted in S. Whitfield, Magritte, exh. cat., The Hayward Gallery, London, 1992, no. 111).
The artist’s friend Paul Nougé, the leader of the Brussels Surrealist group, is reported to have provided the title for the motif, for which the most appropriate English translation is “The Dominion of Light.” “English, Flemish, and German translators take [dominion] in the sense of ‘territory’,” Nougé noted, “whereas the fundamental meaning is obviously ‘power’, ‘dominance’” (quoted in D. Sylvester, op. cit., 1993, vol. III, p. 145). Nougé was undoubtedly sensitive to Magritte’s conviction that his paintings never expressed a singular idea, but rather were a form of stimulus that created new thoughts in the mind of the viewer. “Titles play an important part in Magritte’s paintings,” stated the poet, “but it is not the part one might be tempted to imagine. The title isn’t a program to be carried out. It comes after the picture. It’s as if it were its confirmation, and it often constitutes an exemplary manifestation of the efficacy of the image. This is why it doesn’t matter whether the title occurs to the painter himself afterwards, or is found by someone else who has an understanding of his painting. I am quite well placed to know that it is almost never Magritte who invents the titles of his pictures. His paintings could do without titles, and that is why it has sometimes been said that on the whole the title is no more than a conversational gambit” (quoted in exh. cat., op. cit., 1992, p. 39).
Magritte discussed the idea behind his L’empire des lumières paintings in a commentary written for a 1956 television program, later published in the exhibition catalogue Peintres belges de l’imaginaire, in 1972: “For me, the conception of a picture is an idea of one thing or of several things which can be realized visually in my painting. Obviously, all ideas are not ideas for paintings. Naturally, an idea must be sufficiently stimulating for me to get down to painting the thing or things that inspired the idea. The conception of a painting, that is, the idea, is not visible in the painting: an idea cannot be seen by the eyes. What is depicted in the painting is what is visible to the eye, the thing or things that had to inspire the idea. So, in the painting L’empire des lumières are things I had an idea about—to be precise, a nocturnal landscape and a sky above in broad daylight. The landscape evokes night and the sky evokes day. This evocation of day and night seems to me to have the power to surprise and enchant us. I call this power ‘poetry.’ I believe this evocation has such a ‘poetic’ power because, among other reasons, I have always been keenly interested in night and in day, although I’ve never had a preference for one or the other. This intense personal interest in night and day is a feeling of admiration and astonishment” (quoted in K. Rooney and E. Plattner, eds., René Magritte: Selected Writings, trans. J. Levy, Richmond, 2016, p. 167).
To this day, L’empire des lumières serves as a powerful illustration of his extraordinary ability to deploy symbols of a normal, ordinary, conventional life to contradictory ends: to surprise, unsettle and reconfigure the viewer’s expectations and thus, their experience of everyday reality. It was an aspect of the L’empire des lumières series that André Breton recognized as inherently Surrealist in spirit, stating: “To [Magritte], inevitably, fell the task of separating the ‘subtle’ from the ‘dense,’ without which effort no transmutation is possible. To attack this problem called for all his audacity—to extract simultaneously what is light from the shadow and what is shadow from the light (l’empire des lumières). In this work the violence done to accepted ideas and conventions is such (I have this from Magritte) that most of those who go by quickly think they saw the stars in the daytime sky. In Magritte’s entire performance there is present to a high degree what Apollinaire called ‘genuine good sense, which is, of course, that of the great poets’” (“The Breadth of Rene Magritte,” in Magritte, exh. cat., Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock, 1964, n.p.).
The idea proved incredibly popular with the artist’s collectors, leading to a number of direct commissions for new versions. However, Magritte was adamant that each work should evolve naturally from his own artistic pondering, writing to his dealer Alexander Iolas “I have to find a way of justifying the replica in my own mind” (quoted in C. Greenberg and D. Pih, eds., Magritte A-Z, London, 2011, p. 49). As a result, Magritte actively sought alterations between each variation, in nuance and motif, which allowed him to expand and enhance the poetic effect of the scene. Similarly, changes to the size of the canvases, alternating as well between horizontal and vertical formats, enabled the viewer to experience the impact of the juxtaposition in different ways. As Siegfried Gohr has highlighted, by repeating and reinterpreting the theme, Magritte was “arranging and rearranging visual elements until they produced a shock like a blow from a boxer’s glove—whose force, however, remained purely visual and mental” (in Magritte, exh. cat., San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2000, p. 17).
The second version of the L’empire des lumières theme (Sylvester, no. 723; The Museum of Modern Art, New York) was painted in June 1950, on a larger sized canvas, allowing a broader array of building façades to populate the scene. Though Magritte told Iolas he had “revealed the full strength of the idea” in this composition, he continued to revisit the L’empire des lumières motif multiple times over the course of the following fifteen years, in what may be considered Magritte’s only exploration of working in series (quoted in D. Sylvester, op. cit., 1993, vol. III, p. 157). In each iteration he made subtle alterations, experimenting with the particulars of the scene, amplifying different aspects of the landscape, subtly adjusting the colors of the sky or the density of the clouds, even expanding the sense of space and recession within the picture. Different architectural styles were portrayed in some versions, providing unexpected hints as to the location of the setting, or the socio-economic status of the residents, while the towering trees that surround the building began to take on a distinct sense of individuality and character from one canvas to the next. However, it was the extraordinary duality of night and day that remained at the heart of the L’empire des lumières paintings, a phenomenon to which the viewer appears to be the only witness.
Magritte created the present L’empire des lumières under unusual circumstances, driven in part by his growing renown and public appeal. On 19 June 1954, the Venice Biennale opened to the public. Discussing his visit to the event, Douglas Cooper explained the central organizing principle that lay behind the grand exhibition: “For the first time, the secretary-general had attempted to give the Biennale a certain coherence; having decided that the Presidenza would undertake special exhibitions of Arp, Ernst and Miró, he asked his committee of experts to persuade the national commissaries to take ‘Fantastic Art’ as a theme for their pavilions” (D. Cooper, “Reflections on the Venice Biennale” in The Burlington Magazine, vol. 96, no. 619, October 1954, p. 318). While this dedicated showcase was intended to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Surrealism, in reality the selection of artists across the Biennale was much more diverse than just those directly associated with the movement, and included works by Henri Matisse, Kees van Dongen, Paul Klee, Edvard Munch, Lucio Fontana and Nicolas De Staël.
In the Belgian Pavilion, the organizers took the decision to showcase the many different explorations of the fantastic theme across several centuries, featuring paintings by Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Huys alongside those of James Ensor and Paul Delvaux. The centerpiece of their exhibition was a mini-retrospective of Magritte’s work, featuring twenty-four paintings, ranging from his earliest engagements with the Parisian Surrealists in 1926, right up to his most recent work from the opening months of 1954. The display was in fact a condensed version of the large Magritte exhibition staged at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels in May of the same year, which had featured a carefully selected array of the artist’s most important and recognizable works. Among the most popular pieces on view at the Biennale was the enormous L’empire des lumières (Sylvester, no. 804; The Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice), which was matched in its scale by only two other works in the Venice show—L’assassin menacé (Sylvester, no. 137; The Museum of Modern Art, New York) and Le monde invisible (Sylvester, no. 805; The Menil Collection, Houston). The painting caught the eye of the illustrious collector Peggy Guggenheim, who began to make inquiries about the possibility of purchasing L’empire des lumières.
However, the painting had already been promised to three other interested parties, and suddenly Magritte found himself with the unprecedented dilemma of having sold the same painting multiple times over. In a letter to Jan-Albert Goris from mid-July, the artist explained the predicament: “It is quite complicated from certain points of view: two big pictures on show at the Venice Biennale, and one of which was ‘reserved’ by a collector here and by the [Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts in Brussels]. I have just heard that the Museum has made up its mind (too late, unfortunately), and wants to buy ‘The Dominion of Light.’ As I was in a state of uncertainty, and as I hadn’t committed myself to refuse sales of pictures about which there had already been some financial discussion, and as, in addition, [Alexander] Iolas paid me a flying visit late at night, it was difficult for me to please everybody…” (letter to Goris, 21 July 1954; quoted in D. Sylvester, op. cit., 1993, vol. III, p. 55). In the end, Guggenheim proved to be the lucky bidder, securing the large canvas for her esteemed collection.
As a result, Magritte arranged to create three more versions of the L’empire des lumières subject for each of the disappointed parties, all of which were completed by the end of the year. While the painting intended for Iolas (Sylvester, no. 814; The Menil Collection, Houston) was created on a canvas 130 x 95 cm, the other two from this group—the present work, made for the Belgian collector Willy van Hove, and the example for the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts in Brussels—were executed on a slightly larger scale, both standing at 146 x 114 cm (Sylvester, nos. 809 and 810). With these works, Magritte began to expand upon the mysterious, uncanny atmosphere of the scene, adding the shimmering surface of a canal or riverway to the foreground. This marked the first time that the artist had introduced a body of water to the scene, and the rippling reflections lend a new dimension to the imagery, the points of light within the nocturnal scene suddenly doubled. In the present example, the glow from the singular lamppost is softened, granting the composition a greater sense of warmth, which is echoed in the subtle illumination from the windows in the upper story of the house. As a result, the reflections in the water are more clearly discernible to the viewer, the outlines of the lamppost and the windows crisper as they appear mirrored in the canal’s surface, creating the impression that perhaps another world hovers on the very edge of our own.