The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center

Mastering Light: From the Natural to the Artificial

About the Show

Lanterns, candles, gaslights, electric lights, moonlight, and brilliant sun all attract us with their singular magnetism. Artists throughout the centuries have understood this. They have turned the eyes and attentions of viewers with these devices, and, in effect, have left us with not only arresting works of art but also an aesthetic, social, and technological history of lighting. From the old masters through the early twentieth century, this exhibition explores the engagement of European and American artists with lighting through a selection of paintings, watercolors, drawings, prints, and photographs.

In these works, natural light glazing a room carries particular meaning as do moonlight clothing a narrative scene or lampposts beckoning the night. The exhibition’s galleries are devoted to the natural, nocturnal, and artificial, with works selected from the permanent collection and additional loans. Artists represented include Albrecht Dürer, Rembrandt van Rijn, Francisco de Goya, James Gillray, Anna Atkins, Max Klinger, Edvard Munch, Robert Henri, and Edward Hopper, among numerous others.

The exhibition is sponsored by the Evelyn Metzger Exhibition Fund.