I have archived the conference programme here, along with abstracts of the papers, and biographies of the speakers.
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| Antoine Coysevox, Bust of Charles Le Brun (Wallace Collection) |
The Louvre Before The Louvre
Artisans, Artists, Academies
Wallace Collection, London, Friday 5 July 2013
Convened by: Mia Jackson (QMUL) and Hannah Williams (University of Oxford)
Now
one of the world’s most famous museums, the Louvre was once a vast
artistic and cultural centre of a different kind. This one-day
conference addresses the fascinating but little-known period of the
Louvre’s history throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
exploring the role this space, its objects, and its inhabitants played
in the histories of art production and artistic sociability in early
modern Paris.
Eminent
and emerging scholars including two guest speakers from the Musée du
Louvre will together provide an intimate understanding of the artistic
and intellectual neighbourhood of the Louvre and its effect on art and
design in the period. Papers on the day will investigate the collective
spaces and sociable practices of the Louvre (from the royal academies to
artists’ studios), the intersections between personal and professional
spaces for the artists and artisans who both lived and worked in the
Louvre, and the wider significance of the Louvre in artistic social
networks both locally and internationally.
Taking
place in the Wallace Collection, which houses one of the United
Kingdom’s finest collections of art from this period, this conference
offers attendees the opportunity to experience the results of these
artistic collaborations.
Generously supported by the Wallace Collection and the Faculty of History of the University of Oxford.
PROGRAMME
10:00 Registration
10:15 Welcome: Christoph Vogtherr (Wallace Collection)
10:20 Introduction: Mia Jackson (QMUL) & Hannah Williams (University of Oxford)
Session
I: Guest Speakers from the Louvre - New Research on Sculptors'
Reception
Pieces at the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture
Chair: Hannah Williams
10:30 Geneviève Bresc-Bautier (Musée du Louvre): Integration of sculpted works
into the collections of the Académie during the Ancien Régime
10:50 Guilhem Scherf (Musée du Louvre): Reception and diffusion of the sculpted
morceaux de réception during the Ancien Régime
11:10 Discussion
11:25 Tea & Coffee
Session II: Collective Spaces & Sociable Practices
Chair: Susan Siegfried (University of Michigan)
11:55 Drew Armstrong (University of Pittsburgh): Life and Loss in the Académie
Royale d'Architecture
12:15 Esther Bell (Cincinnati Art Museum): Coypel the Curator: Sociable Space
in the Cour Carrée
12:35 Discussion
12:45 Pierre-Édouard Latouche (Université de Québec à Montréal): Des Recueils
des Maisons Royales en Petit (1745) à L'Architecture française (1756) de
Blondel: le remploi d'un plan de la Cour Carrée
1:05 Anne Higonnet (Barnard College, Columbia University): Studios, Sociability,
and Unexpected Consequences in the Old Louvre
1:25 Discussion
1:35 Lunch
Session III: Living and Working in the Louvre
Chair: John Whitehead (Independent Scholar)
2:35 Susan Wager (Columbia University): Un-occupying the Louvre: The Royal
Gem-Engraver Jacques Guay
2:55 David Maskill (Victoria University of Wellington): Louis Tocqué (1696-1772):
A Portrait Painter at the Louvre
3:15 Katie Scott (The Courtauld Institute of Art): Parade's End: On Charles
Coypel's Bed
3:35 Discussion
3:50 Tea & Coffee
Session IV: Neighbourhoods and Networks
Chair: Colin Jones (QMUL)
4:20 Dena Goodman (University of Michigan): 4 rue des Orties: the Louvre of
the Silvestres, 1668-1805
4:40 Laura Auricchio (The New School): Beyond the Louvre: Re-mapping the
Paris Art World in the Age of Louis XVI
5:00 Discussion
5:15 Closing Remarks and General Discussion
PAPER ABSTRACTS & SPEAKER BIOGRAPHIES
SESSION I: New Research on Sculptors’ Reception Pieces at the Académie Royale
de Peinture et de Sculpture
Geneviève
Bresc-Bautier (Musée du Louvre),
Integration of works into the collections of
the Académie during the Ancien Régime
Guilhem Scherf (Musée du Louvre), Reception and diffusion of the sculpted morceaux de réception during
the Ancien Régime
Dans le cadre de la préparation du catalogue raisonné des
morceaux de réception sculptés à l’Académie de Peinture et de Sculpture, une
étude particulière est entreprise afin de mieux cerner le problème de la diffusion
publique de ces morceaux d’excellence, dont le caractère principal est
l’exemplarité. Des répliques de certaines de ces œuvres ont en effet été
disponibles, dès le milieu du XVIIIe siècle, grâce aux artistes eux-mêmes ou à quelques amateurs. La circulation
d’exemplaires en terre cuite, en plâtre, en biscuit de porcelaine, voire en
bronze, a permis une assez large divulgation de plusieurs modèles, qui
devinrent ainsi célèbres. Cette diffusion fut accélérée à grande échelle au
XIXe siècle lorsque les maisons d’édition Susse et Barbedienne ont
commercialisé plusieurs de ces modèles.
Geneviève
Bresc-Bautier has been a curator for the national museums of France since 1972
and has been director of the department of Sculpture at the Musée du Louvre
since 2004. She is a specialist in French sculpture of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, particularly Champenoise sculpture of the sixteenth
century. She led the research for an exhibition devoted to this subject at
Troyes and was responsible for the exhibition France 1500 (2010) at the Grand Palais. She is the author of several works on the
history of the Louvre.
Guilhem Scherf is Head
Curator of Sculpture at the Musée du Louvre. He is a specialist in
eighteenth-century sculpture and has curated several exhibitions devoted to individual
artists – Clodion (1992), Pajou (1997), Houdon (2003-2004), Julien (2004) – along with several other thematic
exhibitions : Terres cuites de Pigalle à Canova 1740-1840 (2003-04), Portraits publics portraits
privés (2006-07), Bronzes français de
la Renaissance au siècle des Lumières
(2008-09).
SESSION II: Collective Spaces & Sociable Practices
Drew Armstrong (University
of Pittsburgh), Life and Loss in the Académie Royale d’Architecture
Among
the learned bodies that occupied space in the Louvre, the Royal Academy of
Architecture was perhaps the one with the most significant claim on the
building: its membership included both the architects who oversaw the fabric of
the palace and the theorists who propagated official architectural dogma. The
Louvre itself – specifically Claude Perrault’s famous colonnade – became one of
the chief models of the classical aesthetic promulgated by the Academy in the
eighteenth century.
This
paper proposes an overview of what is known about the life of the academicians
and students of the Academy of Architecture during the century they occupied
rooms in the Cour Carrée of the Louvre (1692-1793). The Academy was a site of
great moment, receiving visits from the young Louis XV in 1719 and the Emperor
Joseph II in 1777. Within its walls, some of the greatest architects of the
eighteenth century experienced their first triumphs at award ceremonies for
winners of the annual grand prix
competitions, presided over by the director of the Royal Works [the Bâtiments du Roi].
The more mundane activities of the Academy of
Architecture included weekly conferences open only to its members and public
lectures open to any “homme de goût.” Studios [loges] for architecture students became hotbeds for illicit
activities, documented in official correspondence and resulting in various
crackdowns from the administration. Unquestionably the least likely figure to
live within the Academy was the actress Manon Balletti (1740-89), erstwhile
lover of Casanova and bride of the professor of architecture, Jacques-François
Blondel (1705-74). Immortalized in one of Jean-Marc Nattier’s finest portraits,
Balletti’s eviction from the Louvre illustrates the tensions at the
intersection of space and status in the academic world of the Ancien Régime.
Drew Armstrong is
associate professor and director of Architectural Studies in the Department of
History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the
author of Julien-David
Leroy and the Making of Architectural History (Routledge, 2012) as well as articles in the Art Bulletin and the Journal of the Society of
Architectural Historians.
Esther Bell (Cincinnati
Art Museum), Coypel the Curator: Sociable Space in the Cour Carré
False
attributions, botched restorations, and the perils of connoisseurship—do a
riveting comedy maketh. Charles-Antoine Coypel (1694-1752) not only wrote such
a play, but he lived it. Born into one of the most powerful dynasties of
history painters, Coypel inherited his father’s decidedly luxe living quarters
and studio in the Cour Carrée as well as the post of Garde des tableaux et dessins
du Roi. Before the advent of the Musée du Louvre, the King’s collection of
drawings and many of his important paintings were housed with Coypel in his
multi-level apartment. Fellow artists and gens
des lettres gathered in this space that had been transformed into a
reception area and art gallery. How did this socially ambitious Premier Peintre du Roi fulfill his
duties as curator of this remarkable collection? Answers can be found in Coypel’s organization of over eight
thousand drawings by artist and school, a project that would span decades and
which he achieved with the assistance of his trusted friends and advisors.
Answers can also be found in his unpublished three-act comedy La Curiosi-manie, which gathers a motley
cast of art appreciators and amateurs. This delightful and complex play, as
well a selection of prints, drawings, and paintings, will illustrate the
“commerce” that bound together Coypel and his circle.
Esther Bell is the Curator of European
Paintings, Drawings, and Sculpture at the Cincinnati Art Museum. She received
her doctorate from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University with a
dissertation entitled: “Charles-Antoine Coypel: Painting and Performance in
Eighteenth-Century France.” She is currently preparing an exhibition featuring
the collection of Jeffrey E. Horvitz, to open in February 2014: “François
Boucher and the Generation of 1700.”
Pierre-Édouard Latouche (Université de Québec à Montréal),
Des Recueils des Maisons Royales en Petit
(1745) à L’Architecture française (1756) de Blondel : le remploi d’un plan de
la Cour Carrée
The paper discusses a plan of the ground floor of the
Cour Carrée drawn in the mid-eighteenth century and now kept in the collection
of the Canadian Centre for Architecture (Montréal). The plan is in ink, with
later additions in graphite. It includes numerous retombs showing the intricate
layers of entresols characteristic of the sculptor’s ateliers. A careful
comparison with contemporary plans of the Louvre links the CCA sheet directly
to the Recueils des Maisons Royales en Petit, a set of five volumes detailing
crown properties. The Recueils, ordered by Lenormant de Tournehem upon taking
office as director of the Bâtiments du Roi in 1745, was meant for internal
administrative use . The comparison establishes that the CCA drawing was one of
many numerous large-scale initial survey plans drawn in 1746 and reduced to fit
the Recueil’s compact format. The graphite additions, all of them showing
partitions, chimneys, staircases and windows added or demolished, correspond
exactly to the state of the Cour Carrée as represented a decade later in
L’Architecture française by Jacques-François Blondel. In all likelihood the CCA
sheet served twice, once in 1746 to satisfy the needs of a new administration,
and a second time in the mid-1750s to produce one of the Enlightenment’s great
works of architectural theory.
Pierre-Édouard
Latouche is professor (since 2010) in the department of Art History at
Université du Québec in Montréal, where he teaches architectural history.
Previously, he was curator of prints and drawings at the Canadian Centre for
Architecture (Montreal). His research focuses on the architecture in New France
between 1650-1750, on literacy levels among craftsmen in Montreal’s building
trade in the 18th century, and on active and passive solar housing in the US in
the 1970s.
Anne Higonnet (Barnard
College, Columbia University),
Studios, Sociability, and Unexpected
Consequences in the Old Louvre
The
social networks and mixed use of the ancien
régime Louvre have proved to explain one of the most popular paintings by
an utterly obscure artist: the 1801 Young
Woman Drawing. This life-size portrait in the collection of the
Metropolitan Museum of Art has long been famous because of its authorship,
which was once attributed to Jacques-Louis David, and is now attributed with
reasonable probability to Marie-Denise Villers. My recent research, based on
archives, maps, and above all on the history of the Louvre, indicates that the
foreground of the painting represents an all-women’s studio run in the Louvre
apartment allocated to the painter Jean-Baptiste Regnault (1754-1829), a studio
managed by his wife. The view through the window, meanwhile, represents a
residential building across the Seine, inhabited by the likely subject of the
portrait: Charlotte du Val d’Ognes, herself an art student. The painting thus
represents an inadvertent but logical consequence of the artistic sociability
created by the various uses of the Louvre in the period before it was dedicated
to museum functions. Only in a personal apartment, inhabited and chaperoned by
a wife, could a painter have operated a studio for respectable young women. The
spatial intimacy shared by the many artists and their families who were lodged
in the Louvre, moreover, allowed artistically ambitious women to acquire
contacts and skills in a socially safe environment. Du Val d’Ognes, for
instance, claimed to been “taught” by David, who lived and worked in the
Louvre. At the same time, the professional proximity of resident artists such
as Adelaïde Labille-Guiard, of all-men’s studios like Regnault’s and David’s,
and of the Salon exhibitions, must have inspired women like Villers and du Val
d’Ognes. This paper looks through one revolutionary painting back to the
conditions which made that painting possible.
Anne Higonnet is Ann Whitney Olin
Professor of Art History at Barnard College, Columbia University. Her most
recent essays, on Manet, have appeared this past year in the Frick Collection's
The Impressionist Line and in Grey Room. Her most
recent book, a study of personal collection museums, is A Museum of One's
Own (Periscope, 2009).
SESSION III: Living and Working in the Louvre
Susan Wager (Columbia University), Un-occupying the Louvre: The Royal Gem-Engraver Jacques Guay
When an artist was granted accommodation in the Louvre,
how did he take possession of his assigned space? Conversely, in what ways did
certain Louvre logements or studios with unofficially pre-determined
professional or familial identities take possession of their new inhabitants? I
explore these questions in relation to Jacques Guay, an engraver of precious
stones who occupied apartment number 21 in the Louvre’s galleries for some
forty years, half of which were in absentia. In addition to his logement at the
Louvre, Guay was given a studio in the Versailles apartments of his chief
patron, the royal mistress Madame de Pompadour. It was here that he lived and
worked until Pompadour’s death in 1764. While new residents at the Louvre
frequently subjected their apartments to renovations and personal adjustments,
evidence suggests that Guay took few measures to erase the traces of the
previous tenant from his apartment. To the contrary, it seems that establishing
continuity with this former inhabitant—also a royal gem-engraver—was more
important than Guay’s physical occupation of the space. Continuity and
inherited tradition were profoundly intertwined with the medium of
gem-engraving, prized by eighteenth-century connoisseurs for its seemingly
direct and unadulterated procession from antiquity. Guay’s work was admired for
its connection to antiquity, and yet many of his engravings were emphatically
contemporary in both style and subject matter. How did Guay’s (un-) occupation
of his Louvre logement contribute to his negotiation of the demands of his
medium and patron, and to the formation of his artistic identity?
Susan Wager is a Ph.D. candidate
in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. For
2012–2014 she is Samuel H. Kress Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the
Visual Arts (CASVA). Her dissertation is entitled “Boucher’s Bijoux: Luxury
Reproductions in the Age of Enlightenment.”
David Maskill (Victoria University of Wellington), Louis Tocqué (1696-1772): A
Portrait Painter at the Louvre
In February 1772, the royal academician and society
portraitist, Louis Tocqué died in his lodging in the Louvre having lived there
for over a decade. Together with his wife and servants, he occupied a series of
rooms spread over four floors in the galleries of the Louvre. Tocqué had been
granted his lodging in 1759, by which time he was a highly successful and well
traveled portrait painter, having worked at the courts of Russia and Denmark.
In 1750, he delivered a lecture at the Académie royale on the practice of
portrait painting and at his death, an extended obituary penned by his wife was
read to the assembled academicians.
Using the unpublished inventory of his estate as a starting point, this paper
examines the material and cultural world which Tocqué and his wife created for
themselves. From the objects they used, from what they wore, read, hung on the
walls and viewed from the windows, we get a tantalising glimpse of the artist’s
domestic life. Then, the paper will consider the social, material and career
advantages for an artist in having such a prestigious address.
David Maskill is a senior
lecturer in art history at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand where
he teaches courses on French 18th-century art and the history of prints. He has
published articles in Print Quarterly on aspects of French 17th and 18th-century
printmaking.
Katie Scott (The Courtauld Institute of Art),
Parade's End: On Charles Coypel's Bed
This
paper is concerned with the artists’ lodgements at the Louvre as domestic
interior; specifically it addresses the role played by the decoration and use
of the bed and bedchamber in fashioning artistic identity. The bed itself does
not survive, but an important element of it, the allegorical work
Painting Awakens Genius and two
preparatory drawings enable its reconstruction. This paper argues that by
following the fortunes of Coypel’s bed, including its dismantling, we can learn
something important about shifts in the conceptualisation of art and
artist in early eighteenth century France.
Katie Scott is Professor at The
Courtauld Institute of Art, London.
Author of The
Rococo Interior: Decoration and Social Spaces in Eighteenth-Century Paris (1995) her research interests include the
fine and decorative arts of the eighteenth century and issues related to the
emergence of copyright and patent in the early modern period.
SESSION IV: Neighbourhoods and Networks
Dena Goodman (University of Michigan),
4, rue des Orties: The Louvre of the
Silvrestres (1668-1805)
In this paper I trace a history of the family of Israël
Silvestre (1621-1691), who was first granted an apartment in the Louvre by
Louis XIV. Several generations of
Silvestres continued to inhabit the Louvre right up until it was emptied of residents
in 1805. However, it was not their
only habitation. Once the court moved out of the Louvre, not long after the
Silvestres moved into it, the post of maître à dessiner des enfants du Roi,
which they held du père en fils until the 1780s, obliged them to live at
Versailles. Nevertheless, the
Louvre apartment continued to play an important if changing role in the life of
this family. As professional and familial ambitions moved steadily away from
the Louvre and toward the court, the artistic and intellectual community of the
Louvre helped the Silvestres to maintain their cultural identity, symbolized by
a growing art collection. I conclude with the return of the family to the
Louvre during the French Revolution and their final expulsion from it in 1805.
Dena Goodman is
Lila Miller Collegiate Professor of History and Women’s Studies at the
University of Michigan. A
historian of the Enlightenment, women, gender, sociability, and writing, she is
the author of The
Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment and, most recently, Becoming a Woman in
the Age of Letters.
Laura Auricchio (The
New School, New York),
Beyond the Louvre: Re-mapping the Paris
Art World in the Age of Louis XVI
In a recent interview with National Public Radio, Simon
Garfield, author of On the Map: A Mind-Expanding Exploration of the Way the
World Looks (New York: Gotham Books, 2012) observed that, “if you have the
power to commission a map or make your own map, you're going to make it reflect
your world and reflect your views.” To the extent that the Paris art world of
the late eighteenth century can be said to have been mapped, its
cartographers—art historians—have generally adopted the world view of the
Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture by placing the Académie, its
members, and its Louvre headquarters at the center. This paper aims, quite
literally, to re-map the social, professional and intellectual realm of artists
and artisans in the age of Louis XVI. While acknowledging the significance of
the Louvre, the paper looks beyond the palace walls to situate the Louvre
within the social geography of Paris. Drawing upon information available in
almanacs, the diaries and correspondence of artists and patrons, and other
period sources, the paper charts the locations of residences, schools, shops,
and exhibiting venues that welcomed artists and artisans in the 1770s and
1780s, including the majority who did not enjoy lodgings in the Louvre. In this
way, it identifies and investigates networks of patronage, influence, and
affiliation that were woven through, but not fully contained within, the
Académie.
Laura Auricchio, Associate
Professor of Art History and Dean of the School of Undergraduate Studies at The
New School in New York, specializes in French and American visual culture of
the long eighteenth century. She is co-editor ofArboreal Values: Trees, Woods, and Forests in Europe and North America,
1660-1830
(2011) and author of
Adélaïde Labille-Guiard: Artist in the Age of Revolution
(2009). Articles and reviews have appeared in academic and popular
publications ranging from The Art Bulletin
, Eighteenth-Century Studies
and
Journal of Design History
to Time Out
New York
. Her forthcoming book, The
Marquis
, will be published by Alfred A.
Knopf in September/October 2014.
