For Gustave Moreau, watercolors played almost the same important role as oil paintings. His only solo exhibition held during his lifetime consisted of watercolors. Moreau often made miniature reproductions of his completed paintings on request. He also used water paints in his studies and sketches, including enamel projects. “The Night” belongs to this series of works. These “modelli” are complete and thoroughly detailed. The sketch is done in watercolors, whitewash, pencil, and gold. The choice of the decorative frame with griffins can be explained by the purpose of the sketch. Starting in the middle of the 19th century, France saw a revival of the ancient art of enamel, the secrets of which seemed to have been lost. Moreau provided watercolor sketches to enamelers, but he did not produce enamels himself. This work was created in the early 1880s, though its concept has a long-standing history. The figure of the Night is a replication of the female figure representing Death in Moreau’s painting “The Young Man and Death.” Death is depicted as a sleeping woman with an hourglass and a sword. She is identified with Parcae Atropos, the daughter of the Night, the goddess of fate cutting the thread of life. The painter later removed some of the attributes and placed the figure against the background of the sky. In this way, he turned the allegory of Death into the allegory of the Night, while still keeping the conceptual ties between the two artworks: in particular, the motif of sleep remained as a prototype of death.