After studying the Hudson River School paintings of Thomas Cole and Asher Durand, George Inness encountered the work of artists associated with the Barbizon school during a trip to France in 1853. Influenced by their incorporation of loose brushstroke and soft tonal qualities, he began painting landscapes with ethereal, atmospheric effects.

Inness painted this moody, enigmatic nocturne a year before his death. The composition is suffused with shadows, which are punctuated by the flickering golden lights—possibly from gas lamps—that emanate from the pictured homes, as well as from the ambient moonlight. Revealing the influence of the ideas of the eighteenth-century mystic philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg, who believed our visual world to be a metaphor for a higher metaphysical reality, Moonlight reverberates with emotional and spiritual intensity.