ECR French Nineteenth-Century Art Network: ECR Symposium: Lightning Talks
25 May 1600 (BST) / 1700 (CEST) / 1100 (EDT)
Our network session in May will be a chance for emerging scholars in the field of nineteenth-century French visual culture to present an area of their research within a short, 10-minute talk. We welcome any area of research from caricature to sculpture, and from any period within the nineteenth-century. We hope to offer researchers the opportunity to explore and develop their ideas and to engage with an informed audience, as well as highlight the fantastic research currently being undertaken.
Details of our speakers:
Justine Gain (Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes / École du Louvre/INHA): Was he even an artist? The ambiguous status of Jean-Baptiste Plantar (1790–1879), from the Académie de SAint-Luc to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts
Jean-Baptiste Plantar (1790-1879), last sculptor des Bâtiments du Roi, despite his anonymity, was an important ornamentalist, as long as he contributed to the decoration of the prestigious places of his time: the Louvre, Versailles, Palais-Royal, Tuileries and Fontainebleau, to only mention a few of them. By his plural activities, he highly participated to create the visual landscape of the first 19th century, also designing for decorative arts, the cast iron, and the bronze industry. Due to his position, his artistic status was ambiguous. Coming from a sculptor’s family from the Académie de Saint-Luc, he attended to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, before he chose the way of ornament. This presentation aims to understand, through the example of Plantar, both the implications, and the criteria to be a recognised artist at the time, and how he heralded the golden age of ornamentalists a few decades after.
Justine Gain is a PHD student at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes and the Ecole du Louvre, working on a thesis titled ” The fabric of ornamental eclecticism during the 19th century, the work of Jean-Baptiste Plantar (1790-1879). After several experiences in museums as the Louvre, Orsay, Versailles or the Frick Collection, she is currently a fellow at the National Institute of Art History in Paris. She also teaches at Ecole du Louvre since 2020, as well as at the Paris College of Art.
Jennifer Laffick (Southern Methodist University in Dallas, TX): ‘Guillaume Guillon Lethière and the Haptics of French Military Loss’
This presentation will consider the dynamics of touch at work in two contemporaneous paintings by the Guadeloupe-born French artist, Guillaume Guillon Lethière: “Saint Louis Visiting Plague Victims in the Hills of Carthage” and “The Oath of the Ancestors,” both finished in 1822. The paintings were produced for different audiences (Paris vs Port-au-Prince) and depict different historical moments (the medieval Crusades vs the Haitian Revolution). However, at the center of both canvases are two men touching. I will argue that this is a significant formal and narrative choice by Lethière which catalyzes an anti-imperial message in each painting.
Jennifer Laffick is an Art History PhD candidate at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, TX. Her research focuses on the first three decades of the nineteenth century with particular attention to how imperial politics intersect with visual culture (especially paintings and prints). Jennifer is also interested in curatorial work and has held museum positions at a range of institutions including the National Gallery of Art and the Wallace Collection.
Elizabeth Mangone (Washington University in St Louis): ‘Mary as Icon: Gauguin’s Visual Depictions of Syncretic Thought’
Paul Gauguin’s paintings are widely known for their depictions of exoticized landscapes, sensual women, and vivid colors. They are also rife with religious imagery from Europe, Polynesia, and Asia. Gauguin’s use of Christian iconography commonly made use of figures such as Eve, Christ, and the Virgin Mary, but his images of Mary are less studied in comparison to other religious subjects. This research sets out to examine the motivations and visual strategies behind this aspect of his art. My analysis explores Gauguin’s depiction of the Virgin Mary with a special focus on the paintings he made while living in Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands. I argue that his approach to this work reveals his contentious relationship with the Catholic church and evidences his use of the Virgin Mary as a visual icon for his syncretic system.
Ane Cornelia Pade (University of Cambridge): 'Ice Cream and Blood – Negotiating Luxury after the Terror.'
In 1796, Paul Jean Marie Garchy opened an ice cream parlour, Chez Garchy, above the fashion merchant Rose Bertin’s store in nr. 26 Rue de la Loi. In the evening, after performances at the nearby theatres, fashionable Parisians conjugated at Chez Garchy, indulging in Garchy’s decadent confections. On the 15th of January 1798, a group of Jacobin soldiers stormed Chez Garchy, smashing, mutilating, and killing anything and anyone who came in their way. The attack was the culmination of a smear campaign in the Jacobin Press, which presented the ice cream parlour as the centre of a Royalist conspiracy plotting to overthrow the Republic. The ‘lightning talk’ explores how the pre-revolutionary luxury debate of the 18th century shaped perceptions of luxury consumption after the Terror and ultimately led to the gruesome attack on Chez Garchy.
Ane Cornelia Pade is a PhD-candidate in History of Art at the University of Cambridge. Her PhD research centres on Parisian public pleasure gardens in the early post-revolutionary era 1794–1814. In 2020 she published the article 'Tivoli: Negotiating Directory Society in the Public Pleasure Garden 1797–1798' in Documenta. She obtained an MPhil in History of Art and Architecture from Cambridge with distinction and first in her cohort in 2020. She holds a bachelor’s degree in History of Art from the University of Copenhagen (2019). She was a visiting student at Yale University (2017) and at Barnard College at Columbia University (2018) during her bachelor's degree.
Oriane Poret (Université Lyon 2): ‘The animal as model in Rosa Bonheur’s art: Travels, networks and collections.’
This presentation will elaborate on my recent research on the networks, sites and collections important to Rosa Bonheur’s artistic production. I will try to reconstruct the menagerie of models and examine what they can tell us about the artist’s paintings as recently highlighted in the monographic exhibition Rosa Bonheur held at the Musée d’Orsay in 2022.
Oriane Poret is a PhD candidate at the University Lyon 2 (France), her research supported by the Foundation of the Friends of the Musée d’Orsay. Her thesis examines the aspects of the animal model in Rosa Bonheur’s art.
Genevieve Westerby (University of Delaware): ‘Dredging the Seine: Impressionist Landscapes of Fluvial Sand Extraction’
Genevieve is a PhD candidate at the University of Delaware and her dissertation examines late nineteenth-century French landscape painting in the context of river engineering and its effect on the environment. In her talk, she will present her recent work on depictions of piles of sand by Alfred Sisley and Armand Guillaumin and what they can tell us about the maintenance of the Seine and its exploitation
This is a virtual event - the Zoom link will be sent out on the day. For any technical issues, please get in contact via email and we will try and help as best we can.
The network will meet (roughly) once a month 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 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