Born in the hillside town of Muro Lucano, southeast of Naples, Italy, Joseph Stella immigrated to the United States in 1896. Having demonstrated remarkable talent as a young boy, he wanted to be an artist, but under pressure from his family, he began medical studies in New York. Continuing to pursue his love of painting through classes at the Art Students League, he soon gained support from his family to pursue an art career, and he went on to study under William Merritt Chase at the New York School of Art, beginning in 1898, and at the older artist’s outdoor summer school in Shinnecock, Long Island, in 1901.

Shortly thereafter, Stella began working as an illustrator for a variety of publications, earning acclaim for his depictions of the Monograph mine disaster and the Pittsburgh steel industry.[i] His drawings of immigrants during these early years, inspired by those living near him on the Lower East Side of New York, are imbued with a classical grace that reveals his study of the Old Masters while growing up in Italy. In 1909, Stella returned to Europe, spending the majority of his time in his native Italy and in Paris, where he learned of the Italian Futurist movement and visited the salon of Gertrude Stein, gaining critical exposure to the early European Modernists and their art. Upon his return to New York in 1912, he was regarded as an important member of the Avant-Garde in New York, frequenting the salon of Walter and Louise Arensberg and befriending artists associated with New York Dada, notably Marcel Duchamp.

Stella produced two of his most important paintings, Tree of My Life (formerly collection of Barney Ebsworth, Seattle)and Brooklyn Bridge (Yale University Art Gallery), around 1920, and their success was followed by the stunning “portrait” of New York, the polytypch, The Voice of the City of New York Interpreted (Newark Museum). Stella painted prolifically for the next twenty years, moving between New York and Europe, where he gained inspiration from a wide variety of sources, including the work of the fourteenth and fifteenth century Italian artists including Piero della Francesca and Giotto di Bondone, amonth others. During his career, he employed a number of styles and subjects ranging from botanicals and the figurative to the industrial and the fantastic.

In 1919, while working on Tree of My Life, the artist began to create silverpoint, crayon, and pencil sketches of flora, occasionally including butterflies or birds, that he would continue to explore for the remainder of his career.[ii] Inspired by time spent in southern Italy between 1926 and 1934, and visits to North Africa (1930) and Barbados (1937), Stella’s colorful paintings of tropical plants and landscapes serve as a counterpoint to the dark industrial and urban compositions of his New York works. While the subject matter of these two groups of paintings and drawings contrast, Stella approached both by creating compositions around a central axis. [iii]

Although the location of the site featured in the current example is unknown, it was likely inspired by the artist’s visit to North Africa in 1930 or his trip to Barbados in 1937. Although he was only on the island for five months, the natural beauty became an important inspiration and revitalized his work in subsequent years. In Tropical Moonlight, the central axis is created by the negative space between the two large rock formations. The moon and palm tree silhouette glow against the bright blues of sea and sky. The haloed moon was an element that the artist featured frequently in works throughout his career, usually depicted in the center of the composition as it is here. Other examples include Tree, Cactus, Moon (1927 -1928, Reynolda House, Museum of American Art, Winston-Salem, North Carolina), The Little Lake (1927 -1928, Montclair Art Museum), and Full Moon, Barbados (1940, private collection), among others.

[i] An explosion at the mine in Monograph, West Virginia, on December 6, 1907, killed over 360 people.

[ii] Barbara Haskell, Joseph Stella (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art with Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1994), p. 120

[iii] Irma Jaffe, Joseph Stella: The Tropics (New York: Richard York Gallery, 1988), p. 10