Zoom in on this image. It's not a photograph. It's called Moonrise, painted in oil in 1884 by Polish artist Stanisław Masłowski, and it hangs in the National Museum in Kraków. It shows almost nothing: a wide, dark sky, a still stretch of water, a low bank of sand, a few bare trees. And just above the horizon, the golden moon, half hidden behind a streak of grey cloud, laying a single ribbon of gold light down across the water toward you. What makes it extraordinary is that it depicts one of the hardest things a painter can attempt: near-darkness. Most of the canvas is dim, and dim light has almost no color and almost no contrast to work with, one wrong value and the whole thing goes muddy or flat. Masłowski handled that faint light so precisely that the scene glows exactly the way a real night does. He was only about thirty when he painted it.