The Pond—Moonlight
photograph by Edward Steichen
The Pond—Moonlight (also exhibited as The Pond—Moonrise) is a pictorialist photograph by Edward Steichen. The photograph was made in 1904 in Mamaroneck, New York, near the home of his friend art critic Charles Caffin. The photograph features a forest across a pond, with part of the Moon appearing over the horizon in a gap in the trees. The Pond—Moonlight is an early photograph created by manually applying light-sensitive gums, giving the final print more than one color.
Only three known versions of The Pond—Moonlight are still in existence and, as a result of the hand-layering of the gums, each is unique. One version was given by Steichen to the Museum of Modern Art and remains in its collection under the title Moonrise, Mamaroneck, New York. A second version was in the personal collection of Alfred Stieglitz, which was donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1933. This had been reproduced in Stieglitz's photography journal Camera Work, No. 14 (1906).
The Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired a duplicate when it bought the Gilman Paper Company collection, and decided to auction it.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 15, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q1960268. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1904, 1933 and 1906.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Pond—Moonlight” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.