This Magritte is reminiscent of knowing the way in a house that no longer exists

The most beautiful hour is the blue hour – ‘that long blue moment’, as I recently saw it described; the time ‘between dog and wolf’ (entre chien et loup), as the French call it. It is especially beautiful in the city. The deep blue of the sky then contrasts with the colors of the traffic lights, the red of which takes on an unexpected depth. The contrast between the darkening blue of the sky and the yellowish light from windows is also impressive. As a young man, the writer Cyril Connolly was so fond of this effect that he would sometimes turn on all the lights in the house at night and stand and look at it from the garden. Such illuminated windows, real or painted, are associated with domesticity and security, but also with threat and mystery.

The latter feeling prevails in the series of street scenes of which the Belgian painter René Magritte produced dozens in his lifetime, a series now known as L’empire des lumières (one will go up for auction at Sotheby’s auction house in London in March, see photo below). There is something eerie about these paintings, the components of which also consist of reflecting water, silhouetted facades and a sky filled with fluffy clouds. Something about it isn’t right – although I saw that ‘something’ when I first saw such a painting in real life (in the Guggenheim collection in Venice) to be honest. Things don’t go the way they’re supposed to go there – but this little connoisseur needed someone else to point this out to him.

That “something” is, of course, defying one of life’s most comforting cycles, that of night and day. At Magritte it is day and night. The night has begun before the day ended. Or, alternatively, the day began before the night ended. In any case, the world is and is not illuminated by the sun. It’s time to go to bed and time to get up.

You know that feeling? I do. British essayist Marina Benjamin is also familiar with it. In her essay insomnia (Artwork of the week, this column often also includes the book tip of the week) she associates Magritte’s paintings with the twilight state into which she finds herself during periods of persistent insomnia. The world keeps spinning, but we have become detached from its rhythm. We’re hovering like an out-of-orbit satellite. Night? Day? Yes, da-hag.

The painting above The Happy Donor – it will hopefully be seen again soon in Singer Laren – also belongs to the series, but differs from the rest. Here it is not day and night at the same time. It is evening and night. Against a pitch-dark background, the contours of a herded man unfold within which an evening landscape unfolds: a frosted lawn, darkened trees, a country house. It seems stately. It has no door. There is no way to that absent door. On that missing road no trace of … et cetera. Yet there is life in the house. What is called, it seems to be ablaze, so red and bright is the light from behind the windows.

Rudy Kousbroek once called knowing the way in a missing house the saddest feeling there is. This painting by Magritte touches on a similar sentiment. The heart, it suggests, is a haunted house. The brightest-lit windows are those through which we can no longer see.