page_title: Nativity at Night
section_title: Composition
hierarchical_section_title: Nativity at Night / Painting / Composition
caption_attribution_description: The Nativity at Night, c 1490
context_page_description: The Nativity at Night or Night Nativity is an Early Netherlandish painting of about 1490 by Geertgen tot Sint Jans in the National Gallery, London. It is a panel painting in oil on oak, measuring 34 × 25.3 cm., though it has been cut down in size on all four sides. The painting shows the Nativity of Jesus, attended by angels, and with the Annunciation to the shepherds on the hillside behind seen through the window in the centre of the painting. It is a small painting presumably made for private devotional use, and Geertgen's version, with significant changes, of a lost work by Hugo van der Goes of about 1470.
context_section_description: Geertgen has simplified van der Goes' composition to a "bold design based on grid-like patterns", which the effects of the fire on the colour values has further simplified.  The van der Goes original "was a more complex, more ambitious and more solemn, but perhaps a less touching, picture."  The Geertgen is a famous painting, that has received much critical attention, not all of which has taken into account the earlier van der Goes work and the effects of the fire and cutting-down.  The statement by Erwin Panofsky that the Geertgen was "the earliest nocturne in the optically strict sense of the word" is described in the National Gallery catalogue as a "rash claim".  Quite apart from the van der Goes, night scenes had essentially been developed in illuminated manuscripts before moving to panel paintings, and the realistic night vision effect of very muted colour values and "simplification of volumes" owes as much to the later fire as the artist's intention. James Snyder, perhaps unaware the painting had been cut down, compares the "fractional figures" on the sides of the painting to those in Geertgen's Man of Sorrows, and says they "bring the viewer into the picture, allowing him to look over their shoulders".  In the Barcelona version the figure of the extreme left-hand  angel is still cut off by the frame.
  Geertgen worked in Haarlem, and was the leading Netherlandish painter of his day who both came from and worked in the Northern Netherlands (approximately the modern Netherlands), rather than Flanders (mostly now in Belgium).  Various attempts have been made to relate his style, in this and other works, to much later Dutch painting, for example by Max Jakob Friedländer, but "nationalistic allegations that Geertgen was quintessentially 'Dutch'" are rejected by Lorne Campbell.
caption: Detail, Geertgen
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