Illuminated Paris

Essays on Art and Lighting in the Belle Époque

S. Hollis Clayson

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780226594057
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Arte generale

The City of Light. For many, these four words instantly conjure late nineteenth-century Paris and the garish colors of Toulouse-Lautrec's iconic posters. More recently, the Eiffel Tower's nightly show of sparkling electric lights has come to exemplify our fantasies of Parisian nightlife. Though we reflect longingly on such scenes, in Illuminated Paris, Hollis Clayson shows that there's more to these clichés than meets the eye. In this richly illustrated book, she traces the dramatic evolution of lighting in Paris and how artists responded to the shifting visual and cultural scenes that resulted from these technologies. While older gas lighting produced a haze of orange, new electric lighting was hardly an improvement: the glare of experimental arc lights—themselves dangerous—left figures looking pale and ghoulish. As Clayson shows, artists' representations of these new colors and shapes reveal turn-of-the-century concerns about modernization as electric lighting came to represent the harsh glare of rapidly accelerating social change. At the same time, in part thanks to American artists visiting the city, these works of art also produced our enduring romantic view of Parisian glamour and its Belle Époque.
 

1

Cherchez la lampe

Charles Marville, Gustave Caillebotte, and the Gas Lamppost

With the arrival of gaslight, the Parisian night is profoundly transformed. . . . The new illumination is able to create, for the first time on an urban scale, an all-embracing visual and sensory spectacle which permanently affects city dwellers’ perception of their daily ritual.

Martin Bressani, 2015

Charles Marville’s Streetlamps

The series of lamppost photos taken by Charles Marville (1813–1879), a celebrated photographer of the city, was the most tightly defined in his entire œuvre.1 He took about ninety different photographs of the range of gas lamps installed in the city of Paris, focusing upon those erected during the Second Empire.2 It appears he inaugurated the work when he assumed the title, Photographe de la ville de Paris, in 1862. His photographs were thus taken between about 1861 and the early 1870s for the most part, though some were made all the way into the later 1870s. This means that while most of the streetlamp photos were taken during the intense phase of public works enhancements of the second half of the twenty-year-long Second Empire, Marville’s photographic account of the city’s street furniture, le mobilier urbain (hereafter MU), did not end with the fall of the empire.3

According to the Service des Promenades et Plantations, which was charged with installing the new street furniture (including the streetlamps), the MU was defined as “the ensemble of objects or devices or apparatuses, public or private, installed in public space and tied to a function or a service offered to the collectivity.”4 The architect Gabriel Davioud, the chief architect for the service and indeed the chief architect of the city of Paris during the Second Empire and again in the 1880s, was a key figure in this realm.5 According to Marie de Thézy, he was the “véritable père du MU” (the true father of street furniture).6 Jean-Charles Adolphe Alphand, engineer and chief of the Service des Promenades et Plantations from 1854, and from 1867, director of Voierie et Plantations (roads and plantings), played a major role in the specific realm of éclairage. While Marville’s photos of newer gas lampposts—the réverbères and candélabres of the Second Empire (the former single, the latter multiple)—dominate his streetlamp corpus, his photographs record older streetlamp forms and technologies as well, including torchères that appear in his Le Vieux Paris series of the 1860s (an album of 425 vues.)7

Marville’s photographs give the streetlights a human scale (figs. 1.1, 1.2, 1.3). The combination of the artist’s angle of address (motif and photographer, eye to eye) and the framing tactic that he used in shooting the individual lampposts gave them an arresting presence. He often framed the individual machines dexterously: each lamp is positioned symmetrically against a rectangle of pale backdrop (in both figs. 1.1 and 1.2), and is just about bordered and embraced by identical columns in figure 1.3. Lamp photographs like these deserve to be regarded as portraits, in the full sense of the word. The lamps are enough like us to engage our curiosity and sympathy, yet sufficiently distinct to fascinate as singular individuals that could activate our capacity for empathy. Not only are they unexpectedly sensate and alert, for iron-and-glass appliances, but also their isolation from their “peers” in Marville’s series serves to individualize each lamp, making each post appear well poised for an interaction with, and equivalent in presence to, any passerby.8 Each light machine has a head, after all.

1.1 Charles Marville, Hôtel de la Marine, 1864–70. Albumen print. Image: 36.2 × 23.5 cm (14¼ × 9¼ in.); mount: 60.3 × 45.1 cm (23¾ × 17¾ in.). Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

1.2 Charles Marville, École des Beaux Arts, rue Bonaparte, Lamppost, Paris (6th arrondissement), c. 1860. Paris, Musée Carnavalet. Image © Charles Marville/Musée Carnavalet/Roger-Viollet/The Image Works.

The visual language of many of Marville’s lamp photos is noteworthy for its consistency. The photographic style used for the gas lamp pictures was honed by the aesthetic of his earlier photos of very different motifs, including, for example, the Treasury of Reims Cathedral (1854), a tree in the Bois de Boulogne (1862–72) (fig. 1.4), the Fontaine des Innocents (1858), and the spire of Notre Dame Cathedral (1859–60) (fig. 1.5).9 As in the lamp photos, the consistent organizational traits are the isolation and balance of vertical protagonist(s), resulting in frontality, centrality, symmetry, and balance.

1.3 Charles Marville, Réverbère, Hôtel de Ville (4th arrondissement), 1858–71.

Marville’s approach to object photography matched Baron Haussmann’s lamp aesthetic, marking one of the great convergences in nineteenth-century Parisian visual culture. According to François Loyer, “The Second Empire . . . made the streetlamp a major theme.”10 And thus the set of lamp photographs instantiates a correspondence between a great photographer and one of the celebrity objects of the era. Haussmann had strong views about the look, size, and placement of the new streetlights. He didn’t like socles or pedestals. He wanted even to remove them from Jacques-Ignace Hittorff’s famous earlier lamps, such as the colossal columnar fixtures in the place de la Concorde. The prefect preferred that the lamps be down on the ground. Just like a person.

Haussmann explained his preferences clearly in his memoirs of around 1890, emphasizing the quality of light obtained by maintaining a modest scale for the lamps:11

A gaslamp that is placed too high up will project its light farther, but will not give adequate light to the immediate area around it. Obviously, that was not our goal. The higher a lamp, the greater the unlighted area at its base. By reducing the height of streetlamps and the distance between them, and decreasing the intensity of the flame in each lamp so as not to use more gas, we were able to light the city’s streets better. Extremely bright lights are useless; they blind people more than they light their way.

Haussmann’s technical reasons for preferring shorter lamps were inseparable from an evident preference for their chiaroscuro effects on the illuminated façades. François Loyer concurs: “At night this forest of cast-iron trees created a low layer of light. Lampposts were relatively short not only for technical reasons (turning the lamps on) but also for aesthetic ones. The light they gave off just reached the top of the ground floor; the stories above were no more than shadows.”12 But since capturing a particular quality of illumination was not part of Marville’s remit, he responded to their human size as well as their design and ornamental details. The down-on-the-street-ness and the nose-to-nose-with-the-passerby-ness of Marville’s individual lamp portraits are their most striking features.13 For Haussmann, the réverbères needed roughly human stature to guarantee the effectiveness of the illumination produced by a group, line, or cluster of lamps thus sized, but Marville divided the forest into individual trees, and upheld the human scale and machinic singularity of each lamp scrupulously, even tenderly, by virtue of its solitude and painstaking composition. The time of day contributes to the humanity of the lamps.

The topic of the quality of the light shed by the gas lamps of the Second Empire drives home the great and irreconcilable paradox of Marville’s streetlamp photos. The lamps are all recorded in daylight. They are not lit. They are off duty. Pursuing our characterization of the photographed lamps as sensate beings, their consistent daylight identity places them in a theatrical context complete with its defining temporalities. They resemble actors before they step on the stage, or after they have stepped off. They possess a kind of nonprofessional condition, placing them in performative limbo insofar as each has a day-off or time-out persona. They patiently (impassively) and alertly await the fall of night and their illumination. For all their indispensability to the appearance of Paris, they have no agency. The lamplighter (or later the network) acts; the lamps react. Or they might be seen as frozen in the aftermath of performance, as forlorn has-beens documented when the time of recital—the night—has been erased by the return of day. They are becalmed and functionless urban warriors in iron and glass, about the same size as, and sharing the pavement with, myriad mobile passing strollers. They are outright disenchanted by Marville’s plainspoken daylight exposures. Unlit, they played no role in the signature enchantments of the gas era. Marville’s photos of streetlamps—for the most part, réverbères installed in the central and better districts of the city—show us modernization but not modernity.

1.4 Charles Marville, Parc de Bagatelle, Bois de Boulogne (16th arrondissement), 1862–72. Image © Charles Marville/Musée Carnavalet/Roger-Viollet/The Image Works.

1.5 Charles Marville, Flêche de Notre Dame, Viollet-le-Duc Ar[chitecte] (Spire of Notre Dame, Viollet-le-Duc, Ar[chitect]), 1859–60. Albumen print from collodion negative, 49.5 × 36.5 cm (19½ × 143/8 in.). AIA/AAF Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

The temporality of Marville’s streetlamp photos jars into view as strikingly and strangely premodern. Although they are the contraptions that realize the great optical fac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Paris, City of Éclairage
• 1  Cherchez la lampe
• 2  Losing the Moon
• 3  Bright Lights, Brilliant Wit
• 4  Night Lights on Paper
• 5  Outsider Nocturnes
• 6  Man at the Window
• Conclusion: Art Fueled by Lights
• Notes
• Index