The painting Moonlit Night in Naples was created by a famous 18th century artist Sylvester Shchedrin. The artist was called a master of romantic landscape painting, whose talent most fully revealed itself in paintings featuring night scenes. Shchedrin created dramatic images telling his stories through the contrast of warm and cold colours.

The painter was born into an artistic family: his father, Theodosius Shchedrin, was a famous sculptor and professor at the Imperial Academy of Arts. His uncle, painter Semyon Shchedrin also taught there. The young artist was only nine years old, when he joined the class of artist Mikhail Ivanov at the Academy. He graduated with a gold medal awarded to him for his landscape painting View from Petrovsky Island in Petersburg.

In 1818, Sylvester Shchedrin went to Italy on a scholarship from the Academy of Arts. The scholarship was called a pension and it was awarded to the Academy’s best graduates to continue their studies abroad. The artist lived and worked in Naples most of the time. There, he became closely associated with artists from Posilippo School, especially Giacinto Gigante. Their works were a precursor to the development of the Neapolitan landscape tradition — they always worked en plein air.

The artist stayed in Italy for the rest of his life. The characters of his landscape paintings were outskirts of cities, small cozy bays and lagoons.
Shchedrin’s paintings were highly thought-after by famous Russian collectors, such as Pavel Tretyakov, Fyodor Pryanishnikov, Ilya Ostroukhov to name just a few.

Sylvester Shchedrin painted his Moonlit Night in Naples when he was 36, three years before his death. During that period, he extensively worked on night landscapes. The artist believed that it was the time of day, when thoughts about all things in existence came to you with particular acuteness making you aware what human life is about.

The Moonlit Night in Naples shows how accurately Shchedrin learnt to convey night lighting on canvas: he realistically pictured moonlight and the flame of a burning fire. The painting features the view of a medieval castle Castel dell’Ovo from the Tyrrhenian Sea bay.

There are four versions of the Moonlit Night in Naples remaining to date: one of them is exhibited at the Tretyakov Gallery and the other one called Naples on a Moonlit Night is part of the collection of the Russian Museum. The collection of the Tambov Picture Gallery boasts the earliest version of this work. Before the revolution of 1917, it was kept at Pavel Stroganov’s Znamenskoye Estate, from where it got transferred to the Tambov Regional Ethnography Museum and subsequently to the Gallery.