American Art of the Week

American Art of the Week: Paris La Nuit by Charles Courtney Curran

Paris La Nuit by Charles Courtney Curran
Charles Courtney Curran, Paris La Nuit (Paris At Night), 1889. Terra Museum of American Art. Photo via the-athenaeum.org.

I think there’s something quite fascinating about paintings of Europe by American artists. It’s interesting to compare how European cities look through American eyes with American scenes and with European artists’ representations of the same cities. Does a Frenchman represent Paris differently than an American? How does an American see London compared with how he sees New York? Since so many nineteenth and twentieth-century American artists visited and studied in Paris and other major European art capitals, such images are more common than one might think. This painting of Paris at night by Charles Courtney Curran (1861-1942)  is truly magical. By focusing on the narrow view of lights, people, and activity rather than a wider view of more permanent attributes like architecture, Curran presents a homey little scene that feels more small town than big city. Paris certainly didn’t feel much like this when I visited over a century later, but I’m intrigued by the possibility that it once did.


Want to Enjoy Art More? Take a course or get a guide.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.