Nocturnes in Modern Visual Culture: Depicting Night in the Age of Gas and Electric Light

During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the visual experience of nighttime was transformed. A series of new lighting technologies—notably gaslight, arc light, and incandescent electric light—permeated city streets, theatres, restaurants, stores, factories and affluent homes, bringing brilliant illumination to the urban night. The symposium will explore the relationship between these rapidly changing lighting regimes and treatments of the nocturne in European painting, drawing and literature. It will feature papers by Professor S. Hollis Clayson (keynote), a leading scholar on this topic and on the art and visual culture of nineteenth-century France, and Dr Gavin Parkinson, a specialist in twentieth-century European art and visual culture at the Courtauld. The discussions will consider artists and writers including Charles Lamb, Charles Courtney Curran, Edvard Munch, Georges Seurat and Edouard Vuillard.

Organised by Lily Foster and Gavin Parkinson (The Courtauld Institute of Art, London)

PROGRAMME

WEDNESDAY 16 DECEMBER 2015

13.30-14.00 REGISTRATION. The Courtauld Institute of Art

14.00-14.10 Welcome – Lily Foster (The Courtauld Institute of Art) and Introduction by Chair: TBC

SESSION I

14.10-14.35 Matthew Beaumont (UCL), ‘Night-Walks in Crowded Streets: London at Night in the Early Nineteenth Century’

14.35-15.00 Lily Foster (The Courtauld Institute of Art), ‘A Dim, Mellow Glow in the Modern Drawing-Room: The Pictorial Problem of Electric Light in the Interiors of Edouard Vuillard’

15.00-15.15 Discussion

15.15-15.45 Tea/Coffee Break

SESSION II

15.45-16.10 Alice Barnaby (Swansea University), ‘The Technological Picturesque: Late Nineteenth-Century Hold-to-Light Postcards’

16.10-16.35 Gavin Parkinson (The Courtauld Institute of Art), ‘Georges Seurat’s Nocturnal Communion’

16.35-16.50 Discussion

16.50-17.00 Break

17.00-17.45 Keynote: S. Hollis Clayson (Northwestern University), ‘Charles Courtney Curran and Edvard Munch: Contrasting Perspectives on the Eclairage of Nocturnal Paris, 1889 & 1890’

17.45-18.00 Discussion

18.00-18.45 RECEPTION

Ticket/entry details: £9 (single rate) and a limited number of free places for Courtauld staff/students available by booking online.

BOOK ONLINE: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/nocturnes-in-modern-visual-culture-depicting-night-in-the-age-of-gas-and-electric-light-tickets-18500885647

Or send a cheque made payable to ‘The Courtauld Institute of Art’ to: Research Forum Events Co-ordinator, Research Forum, The Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 0RN, stating ‘Nocturnes’.
For further information, email ResearchForumcourtauld.ac.uk