Art in the City of Lights

Paris is known as the City of Light, but in the later nineteenth century it could also have been called the City of Lights. As the French capital transitioned from oil and gas lights to electric illumination, artists responded to components of the new lighting in many of their pictures. In her lecture, guest curator S. Hollis Clayson examines how Paris came to be defined not just by the beautiful daytime sky and star-filled night, but by the artificial light that preoccupied many French and American artists of the Impressionist era and beyond.