Excerpt:
In 1857, French physics teacher Jules Jamin publishes an article on his use of photometry to measure light in paintings, demonstrating that artists cannot replicate the brightness of sunlight. For the rest of the century, artists and critics would debate the usefulness, to art, of scientific discoveries about light.
Annotation:
Light! presented by the Van Gogh Museum (Amsterdam) and the Carnegie Museum of Art (Pittsburgh), invites users to trace developments in lighting technology from the 1700s to the present by looking at the effects of light in several areas: science, economics, street, home, art, and entertainment. The exhibition combines images of objects and paintings with text arrayed on a background of bands of spectral colors. The home section begins with a pair of gilt candlesticks from 1807. Accompanying text points out that these golden candlesticks are not just prettier because they are shiny; they light better as well. This section concludes with an electric Tiffany lamp from 1907, and in between, includes the Van Gogh painting "The Potato Eaters," showing a peasant family eating potatoes in an interior lit by a meager kerosene lamp. Other objects of note are an Argand lamp in the economics section, the first lamp to exploit the discovery that flames burn brighter when fed by oxygen, and my favorite, a group of filament lightbulbs from the 1880s on a rack described in the caption as "various nationalities." The art section includes a live Webcam of the Statue of Liberty, and both the entertainment and science sections point out that many innovations in lighting originated in the theater.