[7]: 126 p. [8]: 177 p.  Other translations include The Dominion of Light: making the distinction: "an empire exists in relation to a ruler, a dominion does not necessarily require this.”[4] One source states the artist was inspired by the works of John Atkinson Grimshaw, an English painter from the Victorian era, who had delighted in his time to paint urban views at sunset.

Hammacher also observed that Magritte was "highly interested" in the landscapes of the great German romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich.

[7]: 126 p.  William Rubin made comparisons between some of Max Ernst's frottage paintings, specifically Forest [(1927), oil on canvas 114 x 146 cm.

in Joseph Slifka collection, New York at that time], commenting of Ernst's painting "the night landscape enigmatically includes a bright daylight sky (Magritte was to explore this same conjunction later in The Empire of Light II).

[3] An early example of Magritte playing with the idea of the simultaneous appearance of night and day is a gouache painted in 1939 that is now in the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam.

In this gouache, the horizon of a twilight sky is sharply lit by a sunset casting a group of trees and houses in the foreground in a black silhouette which is filled with stars and a crescent moon.

Magritte ended up producing multiple large, high-quality versions that year to satisfy the collectors, and he continued to occasionally explore the theme in paintings for the rest of his life.

[4] The motif was included in the designs for a series of murals in the main gaming room at the Municipal Casino at Knokke-Le Zoute in Belgium.

Titled The Enchanted Domain, Magritte produced a set of eight easel sized paintings reprising and intergrading numerous themes that had appeared in his previous work.

Another painting from 1958, in which Magritte switched the lighting, with a sunlit landscape under a night sky is Le salon de Dieu (God's Drawing Room), oil on canvas, 43 x 59 cm., (in the private collection of Arnold Weissberger, New York in 1977).

[16] The painting also appears in the second episode of the first season of the Korean drama series Squid Game, when the character Jun-ho is searching his missing brother's apartment.