Philip James De Loutherbourg, Visitor to a Moonlit Churchyard

Paul Mellon Collection, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven

Date: 1790
Technique: Oil on canvas, 863 x 685 mm

A figure stands in the overgrown ruins of an abbey, contemplating the remnants of an old painting showing the Resurrection. Above the figure of Christ a sundial throws a long moonlight shadow, suggesting the imminence of death and the possibility of Christian salvation. The ruin is identifiable as Tintern Abbey in the Wye Valley. This was one of the most-visited tourist sites of the late eighteenth-century, favoured because of its emotive historical associations with the Protestant Reformation.

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