Pierre Bonnard

Child with a Lamp

1896
Color lithograph on paper
The Clark
© 2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

Intense lamplight simplifies each element of this scene. The curve of the bright red tabletop—tilted in this perspective almost parallel with the surface of the print—echoes the shape of the lampshade and of the child's face, his features flattened by the glare. The toy trains he is playing with seem to link the oil table lamp's brilliance with the power of outdoor electric lighting.

Jean-Louis Forain

Dancer in Her Dressing Room

c. 1890
Oil on panel
The Clark

Two oil lamps cast dim light into a cramped dressing room, their pink pleated shades echoing the dancer's tutu. The low light level reinforces the intimacy of the scene. Usually only servants and a privileged few—often wealthy male patrons of the young dancers—would have seen this sort of private moment offstage.

Sonia Delaunay-Terk

(Russian, 1885–1979)

Disk

1915
Gouache on paper
Sheet: 9 3/4 x 7 3/4 in. (24.8 x 19.7 cm)
Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, Amherst, Massachusetts
Gift of Thomas P. Whitney (Class of 1937), AC 2001.03

Delaunay was fascinated by the recently installed incandescent electric street lamps in Paris. She invented an abstract language of shape and color in response to this new urban phenomenon, inspired by the blazing halos generated by the lights on the Boulevard Saint-Michel. The concentric rings and sharp primary colors of this small study exemplify the artist's new light-based visual vocabulary.

Édouard Vuillard

Interior with Pink Wallpaper II, from the series Landscapes and Interiors

1899
Color lithograph on paper
The Clark
© 2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Petroleum lamps dominate several of the prints in Vuillard’s series Landscapes and Interiors. In this print, the light is brilliant yellow. The fixture is as elaborately ornamented as the wallpaper, and its illumination ignites the colors and patterns that fill the room. In the lower left corner a figure is partially blocked by the lamp and cropped by the edge of the image; only the checkered fabric covering an arm and torso is visible.

Maurice Prendergast

Paris (Nocturne, Place Vendôme)

c. 1907
Watercolor and gouache on paper
Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts
Gift of Mrs. Charles Prendergast

This broadly brushed view of a fashionable square in Paris is one of the few night scenes Prendergast made during his three trips to France. Darkness, represented in shades of blue, renders the figures indistinct, but the otherwise monochrome scene is enlivened by the light spilling out of the building and reflecting off the wet pavement.

James Tissot

The Ladies of the Chariots

1885
Etching and drypoint on paper
The Clark

This print is based on Tissot's painting of the same subject, and depicts the Hippodrome de l'Alma, a large racetrack and entertainment venue built in 1877 using the latest engineering methods in steel and glass. In the 1880s, the structure incorporated electric arc lights, whose piercingly white light features prominently here. The contemporaneity of the setting heightens the up-to-the-minute glamour of the extravagantly costumed equestrian performers.

Théophile Alexandre Steinlen

The Shop Window, plate from Les Maîtres de l'affiche

1898
Color lithograph on paper
The Clark

Two women appear mesmerized by the goods on display in a brilliantly lit shop window on an otherwise dark section of the street. The central woman may have just purchased the hat she carries in a large box, or perhaps she is delivering it to its purchaser. In either case, her evident desire for the goods on display suggests the important role that artificial light played in promoting consumer culture.