New Book Out by Senior Research Fellow Prof Peter Davidson

The Lighted Window: Evening Walks Remembered

‘It is evening now and I should walk home soon.’ These are the opening words of Peter Davidson’s new book, which is a study of many aspects of the motif of the lit window seen as night falls. As the title suggests it is partly a memoir of walks through British, European and American cities, beginning and ending with Oxford. It is also a book about places, and a study of the lighted window in art and literature.

Its scope extends in time from early romantic painting in Britain and Germany to contemporary fiction, and geographically from the Low Countries to Japan. It features familiar lighted windows in English literature in the novels of Virginia Woolf, Arthur Conan Doyle and Kenneth Grahame and the verses of Thomas Hardy and Matthew Arnold. It examines the nineteenth century painted nocturnes of James Whistler, John Atkinson Grimshaw and the ruralist Samuel Palmer. It also considers Japanese prints of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; German Romanticism in painting, poetry and music; Proust and the painters of the French belle époque, René Magritte’s L’Empire des Lumières; and North American painters and photographers such as Edward Hopper, Linden Frederick, and Todd Hido. Although Oxford plays a central role, framing the narrative and figuring often, amongst the other places recollected are canal quays and brick-paved streets of the Low Countries, the field paths of England, Stockholm at dead of winter, the classical terraces of Edinburgh, and old London houses in Spitalfields and Bloomsbury.

The last chapter is about works of art which are themselves lighted windows: from Gainsborough’s glass paintings to romantic drawings, varnished and designed to be viewed as transparencies. This chapter also considers toy theatres, back-lit lanterns, Tyrolean Easter sacred theatres and the origin of this little-studied branch of visual art in the sacred installations designed in seventeenth century Rome by the Jesuit artist Andrea Pozzo.

Homecoming, haunting, nostalgia, desire: these are some of the moods evoked by this motif. By interpreting the interactions of art, literature and geography, The Lighted Window shows how the lit window seen in the evening has inspired an extraordinary variety of images and ideas from the romantic period to the present day. ‘It is evening now and I should walk home soon.’

More information about The Lighted Window can be found here.

You can read a review from Literary Review here.