The lamps have a commanding presence in this series, which Marville began in about 1861, and it seems to mark the new era of modern lighting. In the pictures, the lamp posts stand erect in front of buildings, street corners, and fences. Each one adopts a unique personality in its surroundings, with the different backgrounds informing the look and feel of the lamps as much as the flourishes at their bases or slight differentiations in their globes.

Gustave Caillebotte Towards the end of Marville’s photographic exploration of Paris’s lamp posts,painted Paris Street: Rainy Day (1877). One of the key elements in the work, which depicts a bustling Parisian intersection during a mid-day shower, is a street lamp. Centrally focused, the tall, green structure anchors the composition. In a review of the work for Le Bien Public, one critic asked: “Why does this streetlamp flaunt its unpleasant perpendicular right in the middle of the picture?” In the middle of the day, when the scene of the painting takes place, the lamp doesn’t serve a practical purpose. By this point, gas lamps had been woven into the fabric of the city; for Caillebotte, it was merely another architectural element of the modern Parisian streets. Yet there is a certain dissonance between the natural light of day and the useless invention that splits the canvas in two.