During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the visual experience of nighttime was transformed. A series of new lighting technologies—notably gaslight, arc light, and incandescent electric light—permeated city streets, theatres, restaurants, stores, factories and affluent homes, bringing brilliant illumination to the urban night. The symposium will explore the relationship between these rapidly changing lighting regimes and treatments of the nocturne in European painting, drawing and literature. It will feature papers by Professor S. Hollis Clayson (keynote), a leading scholar on this topic and on the art and visual culture of nineteenth-century France, and Dr Gavin Parkinson, a specialist in twentieth-century European art and visual culture at the Courtauld. The discussions will consider artists and writers including Charles Lamb, Charles Courtney Curran, Edvard Munch, Georges Seurat and Edouard Vuillard.