In Butler’s painting of the 1918 eclipse, a corona of burnished orange encases the void of the blacked-out sun, while the sky is mottled by gray-black clouds that recall the light effects of Frederic Edwin Church, Albert Bierstadt and other American landscape artists. It hangs here as part of a triptych of eclipse “portraits.” His painting of the solar eclipse of 1923, which Butler observed from California, includes a flash of yellow on the border of the black sun: one of the so-called Baily’s beads, a phenomenon just before the totality when the disappearing sun condenses into a single excrescence of blinding light. Two years later, in Connecticut, he saw another eclipse, this one resulting in especially long shafts of white that cut through the cloud cover. Those are the ectoplasmic wisps of the corona that scientists obsess over, and that more art-inclined observers may see as recalling the glowing halos of Renaissance painting.

Image Butler’s “Mars as Seen from Phobos.” Credit... Princeton University Art Museum

In an age before photography could fully capture solar eclipses, Butler’s paintings were hailed as not just a personal impression but as a vital scholastic tool. In the mid-1920s he began to consult for the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and he designed a large astronomical wing whose construction was scuppered by the Depression. During this time Butler painted a number of otherworldly celestial scenes: our blue marble of a planet seen from the craggy lunar surface, or a vermilion Mars as viewed from its own two moons. Here observation gives way to imagination — the surface of Deimos, the outer Martian satellite, appears as parched clay — but these too relied on models and calculations of atmosphere, shadow and light refraction.

He did allow himself one indulgence, though. At the bottom of “Mars as Seen From Phobos,” in the shadow of the red planet, is the outline of a human head. Presumably it’s the artist’s own, painting en plein air where there’s no air to speak of.

If you can’t make it to Princeton, check out the robust website devoted to “Transient Effects,” which features not only Butler’s beguiling paintings but also centuries of art, not on view at the museum, engaged with eclipses and the relationship between heaven and earth. Long before Shakespeare set his eclipse upon Scotland, the Gospel of Luke described the lights going out after the death of Christ, and eclipses frequently appear in Crucifixion scenes by painters such as Matthias Grünewald (who may have seen an eclipse in 1502). Japanese printmakers used eclipses to heighten the spookiness of ghost scenes, while modern artists from Joseph Cornell to Roy Lichtenstein and Alma Thomas painted eclipses with both an awe for science and a freedom reserved for artists. They were, perhaps unwittingly, following in the tradition of Howard Russell Butler, for whom painting had a vocation as fundamental as the sun.