Moonlight on Mount Lafayette, New Hampshire

Moonlight on Mount Lafayette, New Hampshire is a watercolor by the American landscape painter William Trost Richards, dated 1873; it is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the gift of the Reverend Elias Lyman Magoon in 1880.

Richards, born in Philadelphia in 1833, was associated both with the Hudson River School and with the American Pre-Raphaelites, whose Association for the Advancement of Truth in Art he joined in 1863. He was elected a full Academician of the National Academy of Design in 1871, and during the 1870s produced many admired watercolor views of the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Rejecting the romantic stylisation of many Hudson River painters, he aimed at meticulous, factual renderings.

This sheet is one of scores of watercolors that Richards painted for Magoon, a clergyman, collector and writer on American scenery whose home state was New Hampshire. The two men and their wives had spent a holiday together in the White Mountains the summer before it was made. The view, which the White Mountain Art & Artists catalogue identifies as Mount Lafayette and Franconia Notch seen from North Woodstock, shows a valley under a clouded night sky, the moon breaking through at right above the ridges. Two tall, slender trees stand in the meadow, a stream catches the light, and the foreground plants are picked out in fine detail. The medium is watercolor, gouache and graphite on gray-green wove paper; the sheet measures 21.6 × 36 cm and is signed and dated at lower left.

In 1880 Magoon gave many of these watercolors to the Metropolitan to form a Richards Gallery, modelled on the Turner Gallery in London. They were the first American drawings to enter the museum's collection, and this sheet was included in the Met's 2001 exhibition William Trost Richards in The Metropolitan Museum of Art.