U.S. national gallery to display lunar pictures to mark 50th anniversary of moon landing

Visitors view a lunar photograph taken in 1899 during a preview of "By the Light of the Silvery Moon: A Century of Lunar Photographs" at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., the United States, on July 9, 2019. Some 50 works including a selection of photographs will be displayed in the exhibition lasting from July 14, 2019 through Jan. 5, 2020 to mark the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. (Xinhua/Liu Jie)

WASHINGTON, July 9 (Xinhua) -- U.S. National Gallery of Art will display photographs revealing the lunar landscape as early as the 1850s, more than 100 years before human beings made their first footsteps onto the moon surface.

The exhibition, titled By the Light of the Silvery Moon: A Century of Lunar Photographs, will be on view at the U.S. National Gallery of Art, located in central Washington D.C., from July 14, 2019 through Jan. 5, 2020, marking the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing on July 20, 1969.

The exhibition will present some 50 pieces, from the 19th century to the space-age 1960s, which merged art with science and transformed the way that both scientists and the public envision and comprehend the cosmos.

The pictures include Warren de la Rue's late 1850s glass stereograph of the full moon, Lewis Rutherfurd's 1865 albumen prints capturing the moon's different phases taken from his Manhattan observatory, plates of different lunar areas from the ambitious Atlas photographique de la lune, published beginning in 1896, by Maurice Loewy and Pierre Henri Puiseux and made from the Paris Observatory.

From the moment photography was introduced in 1839, photographers dreamt about harnessing the potential of photography together with the telescope, said curators at the media preview on Tuesday.

Throughout the latter half of the 19th century and into the 20th, numerous photographers created uncannily beautiful lunar pictures that captured the public imagination, they said.