LUNAR LORE AND PORTRAITURE. 517 



The thought had not then occurred to him. Now his wife's fan- 

 ciful 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. 



Hitherto the human face and form had engaged his pencil : he 

 could command sittings of his subject where and when he chose ; di- 

 rect the light and shade ; arrange the drapery, select the pose : but 

 here was to be another order of affairs ; a willful, fitful queen, subject 

 to no human wishes, obedient to no mortal command. There were 

 only two evenings in the month in which to study the chosen phase 

 on one of them or both her Majesty might command the vapors of the 

 air and veil herself in impenetrable cloud. Another month she might 

 summon the forces of the winds, and dance with them a demon's dance 

 upon the telescopic mirror ; and, on the next night, when the chosen 

 phase was past, appear serenely beautiful upon a field of stainless blue. 



It may be fairly asked how the artist, contending with so many 

 difficulties, could paint a faithful portrait at all. As it would be im- 

 possible in the moon's short sittings, if one may use the term, to catch 

 an.d 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. Thereon he sketched 

 the outlines of the craters, plains, and mountain-ranges, as the enlarged 

 negative indistinctly presented them. Then, by the light of a lantern 

 suspended from the observatory roof, from time to time consulting the 

 image of the moon mirrored in the telescope, he sharpened every de- 

 tail, marking out the intensely black shadows and the equally intense 

 high lights on the topmost peaks of the terminator, the dazzling edge, 

 and the gradations of tint on the far-stretching plains. 



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 cres- 

 cent, twenty-one inches in diameter, showing the terminator at Mes- 

 sier. 



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. On the remainder of the disk, faintly illumined by earth- 

 light, may be dimly seen outlines of the Apennine ranges, and the 

 craters of Copernicus and Tycho. 



The brilliant convexity of the moon is well thrown out by the clear 



