ECR French Nineteenth-Century Art Network presents:

 Imperial Imaginaries: Visions of a Second French Colonial Empire

in partnership with the French Colonial Historical Society

Thurs 21 March 1600 (GMT) / 1700 (CET) / 1200 (EDT) / 0900 (PDT)

In the second half of the nineteenth century, Napoleon III embarked on a massive program of overseas imperialism. Restoring and expanding the territories previously held by his uncle—notably through conquests in Indochina (modern day Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos), Africa, and the South Pacific—this “Second French Colonial Empire” became an enduring source of economic power and civic pride for France. Trade with the colonies meant access to valuable raw materials and new markets for French manufactured goods, as well as to “uncivilized” populations patronizingly believed to be in need of assimilation to the French system of values. Indeed, the possibilities for empire were seen as limitless, extending to remote territories not yet explored or claimed by Western powers, including the Arctic.

This session brings together scholars who explore, in different media and geographical contexts, the ways in which a renewed imperial vision of France was constructed, circulated, experienced, and understood, both at home and on a global stage.

 Ivana Dizdar (University of Toronto) - “The Domestic North”

In 1855, the French manufacturer Zuber & Cie produced and distributed a wallpaper that featured, among other scenes, an Arctic landscape: complete with a French flag, a sail ship glides through a glacial sea populated by floating ice, glaciers, northern seabirds, and a pair of polar bears at the chilling water’s edge. Despite its portrayal of other regions—Canada, Bengal, Algeria, and Switzerland—the wallpaper’s only portrayal of humans is in the Arctic scene. That the manufacturer and designers, botanical illustrator Eugène Ehrmann and animal painter Théophile Schuler, chose to interpolate human figures in the wallpaper’s Arctic scene is striking. It counters nineteenth-century conceptions of the Arctic as a vast and empty space, devoid of human life, and instead reflects the fact that European powers like France were invested in seeing the Arctic as an accessible and even inhabitable place. Crucially, the figures are not situated in optimal climatic conditions but are thrust into the harshness and precarity of the extreme north. The scene suggests that France has no limit: nothing, not even the risks associated with freezing temperatures, will hinder its colonial spirit. Given France’s colonial presence elsewhere, why, I ask, do French explorers and the nation’s flag appear not in Canada, Bengal, or Algeria but in the Arctic? I argue that Zuber raises the flag in the Arctic precisely because—not in spite—of its status as unclaimed territory. Taking the wallpaper as a point of departure, I examine what it meant to effectively claim the Arctic in French nineteenth-century material culture, decorative art, and interior design.

Ivana Dizdar is a PhD candidate in art history at the University of Toronto and a visiting researcher at the Musee d’Orsay. Her dissertation examines representations of the Arctic in French nineteenth-century visual culture.

Yasmine Najm (Leipzig University) – “(Re)spatializing the Empire: French Official Publications in the Metropole and French Indochina, 1814–1914”

My research focuses on the history of French imperialism, press, spatiality, and nation-state-building processes in the nineteenth century. My dissertation, titled “(Re)spatializing the Empire: French Official Publications in the Metropole and French Indochina, 1814–1914,” aims to uncover how French elites imagined and (re)constructed the French empire in the post-revolutionary period and places a particular focus on the colonization of Indochina. To trace the processes of (re)spatialization that took place after the fall of Napoleon I in 1814/1815, I explore the French Journaux Officiels, a form of official press that has rarely been studied as a primary source for historical analysis and thus remains understudied. In my dissertation, I bring together historical analysis and insights from digital humanities to assess the spatial semanticscontained in the journals to analyze the nature of the spatial discourse used to promote both the (re)construction of the Empire and the French nation-state in the metropole and French Indochina. I argue that Official Journals were used as a tool of (re)spatialization both in their role of physical record of the state’s actions and decisions but also discursively as a medium to semantically test and (re)define the spatial dimensions of the French nation-state with colonial extensions, the spatial format of France in the nineteenth century. 

Yasmine Najm is a doctoral candidate at Leipzig University and a fellow of the Franco-German College Doctoral of the Ecole Normal Supérieur (ENS-PSL). Her research focuses on the (re)spatialization of the French empire and the role of the official press in the nineteenth century, with a particular focus on French Indochina. Before joining Leipzig University, she completed a double-degree master's program in Global Studies at Leipzig University and Global Economic History at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).

Eve Rosekind (Washington University in St. Louis)—“Building A Modern Empire: Empress Eugénie at the Inauguration of the Suez Canal, 1869”

In November 1869, Empress Eugénie of France arrived at Port Sa’ïd to celebrate the opening of the Suez Canal. The modern waterway between the West and the East connected the Mediterranean Sea to the Red Sea through the engineering triumph of the Isthmus of Suez. This project, led by French diplomat Ferdinand de Lesseps, strengthened the political and cultural relationship between France and Egypt. French artists accompanying the Empress portrayed her journey through Egypt and the opening ceremonies, visualizing France’s central role in the canal project and in uniting West and East. By examining these illustrations, this talk demonstrates how the imagery of Eugénie illustrated France’s imperial leadership and political prowess on the global stage. Furthermore, the French public could imagine themselves traveling alongside their Empress, marvelling at their technological innovation and their role in guiding Egypt into the modern era. These images of Eugénie affirmed France’s continued imperial investment in Egypt.

Eve Rosekind is a PhD. Candidate in Art History at Washington University in St. Louis studying late-nineteenth century French art with an interest in Orientalism and Second Empire Paris. She is in the process of writing her dissertation titled “France Producing Egypt: The Material Cultures of Orientalism, 1869–1922.” She holds a BA in Art History from Johns Hopkins University with minors in French Cultural Studies and Museums & Society and an MA in Art History from Williams College. Eve was previously the Curatorial Assistant for European Decorative Arts and Sculpture at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

This is a virtual event held via Zoom, details will be provided upon sign up and a reminder will be sent before the event. For any technical issues, please get in contact via info@ecrfrenchart.com

The ECR Nineteenth-Century French Art Network meets once a month during the academic year virtually via Zoom. It is open to current PhD and research students as well as ECRs who have recently graduated and are making their way in the world of academia/museums/education/arts or heritage. It is global, open to those located anywhere in the world who wish to join. Feel free to join and participate; we hope to create an engaging, diverse, fun and rewarding community.

For further updates/information check out our website or sign up to our mailing list . If you wish drop us an email info@ecrfrenchart.com.

Transformation and Trouble: Photography as a Tool in Nineteenth-Century France 
9 November 2023 - 1600 (GMT) / 1700 (CET) / 1100 (EST) / 0800 (PST)

It is hard to overestimate the extent to which the advent of photography in the early nineteenth century changed the course of visual culture in France and abroad. New photographic inventions, such as Louis Daguerre’s ‘diorama’ (a popular Parisian spectacle featuring theatrical painting and lighting effects) introduced novel visual mechanisms to a wide audience. Though denigrated by critics like Charles Baudelaire for its presumed limitation to merely reproduce the visible world, photography was in fact in dialogue with other means of visual expression. Artists such as Eugène Delacroix and Paul Cezanne were indebted to the medium for the development of many of their paintings; Eadweard Muybridge’s photographic studies of bodies in motion allowed artists such as Edgar Degas to reconsider the artist’s capacity to depict movement.  While linked to aesthetic and scientific advancement, however, photography was equally a vital tool for French colonial endeavours, reinforcing propagandistic messages, justifying missionary activities, and lending seemingly objective evidence to the pseudoscientific project of eugenics and related endeavours of white supremacy. The tool of photography was put to many uses, unified by its promise of technological progress.

We are pleased to announce the following speakers:

Isabelle Lynch (University of Pennsylvania) - "'World Without Sun': The Diving Bell, The Camera, and the Rapture of the Deep."

“Is an underwater environment unsuitable for taking good photographs?” pondered marine zoologist and pioneering underwater photographer Louis Boutan (1859–1934), frustrated with what he described as the “shapeless” and “clouded” images taken by his submerged camera while researching mollusks at the Observatoire océanologique (Arago Marine Laboratory) in Banyuls-sur-Mer, France. Artificial light made photography possible in spaces no sunlight reaches, and as early as 1893, Boutan seized artificial fire to conquer the depths of darkness and bring forth pictures of the sea floor.

Described by the oceanographer and filmmaker Jacques Cousteau as a kind of “Prometheus who had given mankind fire and thus artificial light,” Boutan developed underwater flash technologies, specialized camera housings, and remote-control technologies for deep waters using an electromagnet. Collaborating with electrical engineers M. Chaffour and (later) Joseph David, Boutan developed various lighting technologies to illuminate and visualize underwater environments: dangerously explosive underwater flash bulbs where magnesium coils burned inside oxygen-filled glass bottles, and later, battery powered carbon-arc lamps. How might the materiality and agential capacities of artificial light—which explodes and creates dense clouds of vapor—confound ambitions of scientific objectivity and oceanic visuality? Situating Boutan’s experiment with underwater flash photography within the context of burgeoning research in underwater optics, this paper considers the temporality and “liquid intelligence” of artificial light.

Isabelle Lynch is a PhD candidate at the University of Pennsylvania who studies modern and contemporary art. Her dissertation focuses on the role of artificial light in processes of photographic exposure, development, and projection. She currently lives in Chicago where she teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

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Édouard de Saint-Ours (University of St Andrews) - “Capturing the French imperial imagination: Émile Gsell’s photographs at the edge of colonial desires in Indochina, 1865–79”

In Picturing Empire (1997), James Ryan writes that Samuel Bourne’s aesthetic motivations in creating his commercial photographic portfolio of the British Raj between 1863 and 1870 does not absolve his work of imperial ideology because the context of imperialism was itself ‘a major source of imaginative power’ for photographers (p. 55). This was a euphemism, considering the colonial biases conveyed both in Bourne’s writings and photographs. There were many ways in which photographers could and did support the global agendas of imperial powers, whether they were operating at the forefront of colonial expansion or at the very centre of empire, whether their pictures were disseminated as prints in colonial settlements, or as engravings in the mainland’s illustrated journals.

Émile Gsell is a case in point. A commercial photographer operating from Saigon, the capital city of French Cochinchina (present-day Ho Chi Minh City in southern Vietnam) from 1865 until his death in 1879, he appears to have received only one commission from the colonial authorities. Yet his work often embodied the edge of French designs in Southeast Asia, whether geographically thanks to the expeditions he was able to join, or iconographically through the performance of colonial desires in front of the lens (depicting indigenous women as available, presenting local rulers as loyal allies, rendering tribal people as tame and visible). Furthermore, Gsell’s photographs also circulated widely in illustrated journals and books rife with colonial rhetoric and in the colonial sections of international exhibitions. In this talk, which draws on material in my dissertation, I argue that the apparent contradiction between commission and production actually bears witness to a tacit transaction existing between Gsell and the colonial project at large, as well as to the systemic nature of this relation and the efficacy of photography as a tool of imperial vision. I suggest that the imperial imagination was so ingrained in colonial society that an ambitious and savvy photographer could not fail to give it visual currency. In turn, his production, made appealing by a certain talent for the medium, could not fail to sell.

Édouard de Saint-Ours is a historian of photography specializing in the early development of the medium in Asia. Trained in art history and museology at the École du Louvre (2012–2017), he pursued his doctoral studies at the Universities of St Andrews (Art History) and Le Havre (Contemporary History) and is preparing a thesis on the place of photography within the French colonial enterprise in Indochina in the 19th century. His work has been published in the journals History of Photography, Photographica and Le Magasin du XIXe siècle, and more recently in the collective work Mondes photographiques, histoire des débuts (2023), the catalogue of the exhibition "Ouvrir l'album du monde. Photographies (1842-1911)" at the Musée du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac. Édouard de Saint-Ours also works at the Musée national des arts asiatiques - Guimet, where he took over as Curator of Photographic Collections in October 2023.

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Joshua Teasdale (University of Oxford) - “Capturing Subjectivity in Late Nineteenth-Century Photographic Catalogues”

Animal Locomotion (1884–87) by Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904) was a pioneering use of the camera to depict the spectrum of human movement. It is often incorporated into narratives of Western modernity, wherein the camera surpasses the limitations of the human eye, enabling the rationalisation of the natural world. In these accounts, Muybridge appears to utilise the device to accumulate swathes of visual information, which he gathered into categories and then brought together as a catalogue. As a result, Animal Locomotion has been implicated in the emergence of modern discourses fusing knowledge and power. However, we can fruitfully re-situate his work within a cultural context of experimentation with representational forms, revealing salient tensions with unexpected works. L’Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière (1878) was a visual record of physical symptoms observed in patients with hysteria at L’Hôpital de la Salpêtrière; it functioned as a conduit for comprehending this altered state of consciousness. These physical expressions were subsequently cited by Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) in his Gates of Hell (1880–1917) to convey his subjects’ psychological torment. Through re-framing the catalogue, we can begin to reconsider photography’s relationship to subjectivity in Muybridge’s canonical work.

Joshua Teasdale is a research student at the University of Oxford’s Department of History of Art, and a member of Wadham College. He holds both a BA and MSt degree from Oxford, in History and History of Art, respectively. His research focuses on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century intellectual culture in Britain, France, and the US, with a particular interest in the relationship between representation and subjectivity. His thesis is supervised by Professor Jane Garnett, and titled: ‘Mathematics, Marble, and Martial Arts: Art in Motion from 1887 to 1930’.

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Sophie Lynch (University of Chicago) - "The Blur of Market Labor: Eugène Atget’s Photographs of Les Halles"

This paper considers the blurs that emerge across Eugène Atget’s photographs of market vendors at Les Halles, the busy central market of 19th century Paris. As a visual effect, photographic blur is often an indication of movement that could not be apprehended: residue of that which eluded the speed of the shutter. In these works, the photographer’s lack of control over the unfolding movements of labor offers a series of images that are not easily legible. A spectral figure appears to hover over boxes of fresh produce, lingering on the threshold of photographic visibility. In another photograph, women are hunched over counters, the rapid movements of hands counting coins or garlic cloves blurred by the photographic apparatus. Through the movements of their labor, the figures resist complete photographic legibility. Indistinct expanses invite the deceleration of viewing experiences; half-glimpsed figures emerge and retreat, at times seeming to flee from visibility and evoking the instabilities of experiences of movement and migration. The contours of their bodies only partially expressed, the blurred workers recall the complexities of lived experiences in turn of the century Paris, as well as the spectral past’s imbrication within encounters of daily life. By failing to depict labor through legible forms, the photographs poetically portray the everyday movements of labor and interrogate the ability of a photograph to function as evidence, shining a light on the socio-economic conditions of labor. Through a focus on relations between blurred photographs, movement and labor in Paris at the turn of the century, I argue that blurs caused by the movements of workers come forth as sites of temporal disruption, fugitivity, and resistance.

Sophie Lynch is a PhD candidate pursuing a joint-degree in the departments of Cinema & Media Studies and Art History at the University of Chicago. She studies modern and contemporary art, photography and film from the late 19th century to the present. Following her interests in historical intersections of bodies and technologies, her dissertation considers blurred images in works of photography and film from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. 

Building an Exhibition: Degas & the Laundress 

13 September at 1500 (BST) // 1600 (CEST) // 1000 (EDT)

Online // Free  

Join us for a special Network Session to learn about the landmark exhibition Degas and the Laundress: Women, Work, and Impressionism taking place at the Cleveland Museum of Art between 8th September 2023 and 14th January 2024. The exhibition brings together dozens of Edgar Degas’s representations of laundresses, a subject that he undertook in a variety of media throughout his career. In addition to works pictorializing the labor of laundresses by Degas and his contemporaries, the exhibition will feature ephemera contextualizing the public image and reputation of this working-class symbol throughout the late nineteenth century.

We will be joined by two members of the exhibition team: Britany Salsbury, Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Cleveland Museum of Art; and Ivey Barker, Andrew W. Mellon Photograph Conservation Fellow at the Cleveland Museum of Art; as well as two catalogue contributors: Aleksandra Bursac, PhD Candidate, University of Toronto; and Jillian Kruse, PhD Candidate, Case Western Reserve University. We will hear about the show’s conception and organization, the collaborative research that made it possible, and the objects within. The event will be followed by a discussion and Q&A.

Our Speakers:

Britany Salsbury is curator of prints and drawings at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Her previous exhibitions and publications include Altered States: Etching in Late 19th-Century Paris (2016) and Nineteenth-Century French Drawings from the Cleveland Museum of Art (2023). Her research has been published in journals including Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide and Print Quarterly, and with Ruth E. Iskin, she co-edited the book Collecting Prints, Posters, and Ephemera: Perspectives in a Global World (2019). Her doctoral dissertation on print portfolios in fin-de-siècle Paris, completed at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, was supported by the Getty Research Institute and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Ivey Barker is the Andrew W. Mellon Photograph Conservation Fellow at the Cleveland Museum of Art. She earned a Master of Arts in Photographic Preservation and Collections Management from the University of Rochester, in collaboration with the George Eastman Museum. Her graduate studies and research culminated in the disaster response thesis and workshop, “Water Emergency Response for Aqueous Inkjet Prints.” In addition to being a Fulbright alumna, she has recently held positions at the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, DC and the Image Permanence Institute at the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, NY.

Aleksandra Bursac is a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto. Her dissertation explores how Degas used particular motifs to engage with media and materiality, and to negotiate larger social questions. Her essay in the catalogue for the upcoming exhibition Degas and the Laundress at the Cleveland Museum of Art draws on this work. She will be a curatorial intern in the department of paintings at the Getty Museum in 2023–2024.

Jillian Kruse is a PhD candidate in the joint Art History program at Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Museum of Art. Her research focuses on nineteenth-century European works on paper with particular interests in ecocriticism, experimental printmaking, and the connections between artmaking, anarchism, and utopia in the prints of Camille Pissarro. She has held positions at the National Gallery of Ireland, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Jillian currently serves as a curatorial intern in Prints and Drawings at the Cleveland Museum of Art.