Paintings Come to Life Under New Light

In a forest in France, a woman makes her way home with a stack of kindling under her arm.

When you look closely at the white flecks in “The Forest of Fontainebleau,” you realize it’s not a path that guides her, but a stream. Her dress is blue, not black. And the leaves of myriad shades recede far into the distance.

In an adjoining room of 19th-century European paintings at the Memorial Art Gallery, patrons don’t have to put the same kind of effort into seeing and appreciating every nuance in the Impressionist landscapes of Paul Cezanne and Claude Monet.

The difference? The new ceiling lamps. They simulate daylight.

“The better that people can see the paintings, the better we’re doing our job,” said an exhilarated Candace Adelson, curator of European art.

Since electric light must be toned way down in museums to minimize artwork decay, SoLux daylight lamps are no more intense than tungsten ones used for illumination ever since Thomas Edison created the light bulb in 1879.

In place of the usual yellowish hues, though, they radiate a much brighter, whiter light. They are designed to allow more color from the blue end of the spectrum and thereby replicate daylight.

The effect on the paintings is dazzling: the finest details become crisper and clearer, colors seem more intense, perspective is more lifelike.

SoLux lamps were developed by Kevin McGuire, 37, a former optical engineer at Eastman Kodak Co., and first tried out at the University of Rochester-affiliated gallery in July.

Now spotlighting a Van Gogh exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, they have drawn the curiosity of curators worldwide. Dozens of U.S. museums are experimenting with them.

Judging by the gleeful remarks scribbled in a visitors’ journal at the Rochester gallery, they appear to have a bright future.

“The colors seem to jump off the walls,” marveled Janet Schoenfeld of Baltimore.

“This was the only room that didn’t hurt my eyes,” wrote Maria Razza of Rye Brook, N.Y.

“The strain to interpret the colors under tungsten is relieved--I feel more at ease,” echoed Neil Cowley of Houghton, N.Y.

At $10 to $15 apiece, the 2-inch-wide lamps cost twice as much as traditional tungsten-halogen lamps but last at least twice as long, McGuire said. Besides, he added, “it’s impossible to see the real genius in these paintings without the proper light.”

McGuire has created similar lamps with higher intensities for use in clothing and jewelry stores, Hollywood movie sets, dentists’ offices and even homes.

Imitation daylight is a highly sought-after commodity, and dozens of products are jostling for an edge in the marketplace. But McGuire’s company, Tailored Lighting Inc., has at least gotten a big jump on the competition with museum-tailored lamps.

“No one replicates the daylight spectrum as identically as we do, and that’s why it’s being used in these very demanding applications,” he said.

Steven Weintraub, a New York museum consultant who has long explored ways to improve museum lighting, used a device made by McGuire to calculate the ideal “color temperature” for viewing art indoors.

SoLux lamps match his calculation--3,500 degrees Kelvin--whereas tungsten bulbs emit about 3,000 degrees.

“In a lot of museums, you go in there and you simply can’t see the artwork very well, and people frequently complain,” Weintraub said.

Even museums with windows and skylights can have a cool, overcast look without the addition of artificial lighting. And since many artists work in daylight, their paintings are often best viewed under a similar light, Weintraub said.

Fluorescent lamps don’t work well, he added, because they give off a narrow-wavelength light that makes “everything look very flat.”

He believes the SoLux brings out the best in paintings by the Impressionists, who themselves often experimented in capturing subtle lighting effects.

In Monet’s “Towing a Boat, Honfleur,” which depicts fishermen tugging a boat on shore in Normandy in 1865, a tiny light atop a distant lighthouse reflects on the water.

Under tungsten, “it appeared yellow and didn’t contrast as much with the orangey sky behind it,” Adelson said. Under SoLux, “the little white dot is the focal point for the whole painting. It just glows at you.”

Adelson spent 17 years working in galleries in Florence, Italy, before moving here in 1992. She immediately took a dislike to “The Forest of Fontainebleau,” painted by Narcisse Virgile Diaz de la Pena in 1874.

“I always thought it was a dull painting,” she said.

But under SoLux, “I could see that the artist was really masterful at what he was doing,” she said, smiling. “All of a sudden, it wasn’t my unfavorite painting anymore.”