Artists' Things on the road

Katie Scott and I have been taking Artists' Things out and about with two presentations already this year and another booked in. Our formula for these dual presentations seems to be working quite well - the feedback so far has been great and we've had some dynamic discussions and really useful leads. Each paper begins with one of us giving an introduction with a conceptual frame that sets up the themes that will emerge from the interventions to come - then we each take one object from our collection and present them in dialogue, one after the other.

For the CRASSH '18th Century Things' series in Cambridge, we explored the materiality of artistic practice through two professional tools - Fragonard's colour box and Houdon's modelling stand, and for AAH2012 at the Open University we looked at everyday life in the French Royal Academy through two institutional objects - the secretary's document box and the concierge's register of funeral invitations. The next stop for us is going to be Lyon for the Luxury and Trade Conference this November, where we will be talking about (you guessed it) artists' luxury possessions. Through Boucher's shell collection and Coypel's gold watch, instead of the more conventional image of the artist as a producer of luxury goods, we will explore the artist's role as a consumer.

If you're interested, you can listen to our CRASSH presentation in the 18th Century Things audio archive, where you'll also find lots of other stimulating papers on 18th-century 'stuff'. Abstracts for the papers can be found on the Artists' Things website.

Why do we care about Molière's armchair?

With a couple of hours to spare in Paris on a research trip last month, I went to Comédie Française s'expose at the Petit Palais. The exhibition recounts the history of the Comédie Française through its visual and material remains, tracing the life of the company from its beginnings under Molière in the 17th-century to its revered state today. All is presented through a chronological arrangement of objects including props and costumes; set designs (a whole room of them); theatre buildings; a manuscript ledger - Extraict des Receptes et des affaires de la Comédie depuis de l’année 1659 - recording the daily business of the company; and a jeton probably used as a voting token in company meetings. There were also many portraits of Comédie Française actors and playwrights forming a who's who of French theatre through the ages.

Perhaps the most direct (and certainly the most poignant) connection to the company's past was to be found in the personal objects that once belonged to the company's founder. One of the first rooms in the exhibition was devoted to Molière - with low lighting and spotlit displays, the experience here was of a sacred space dedicated to this patron (and the mostly French exhibition goers were indeed observing appropriately hushed tones). Along with his effigy in a series of portraits and the company ledger open to the page recording his death, there was a trio of reliquaries (seen in my blurry photo): his armchair (first used in the production of the Malade Imaginaire in 1673 and later as a seat in Company meetings), his watch, and his bonnet.

Being in Paris on the hunt for artists' things for the Artists' Things project (see earlier post) and having spent days scouring museums and archives for the merest material trace of 18th-century artists, I was particularly struck by the survival of so many of the 17th-century playwright's possessions. Molière as an individual reached an iconic status that no single 18th-century French artist did, but nevertheless, I found myself wondering why there is comparatively much more interest in collecting, preserving and revering the things that once belonged to writers than those that belonged to artists. Indeed, a large-scale replica of Molière's armchair once became a piece of public sculpture outside the Théâtre de la Comédie Française, and Voltaire's personally customised armchair is on permanent display at the Musée Carnavalet. In the context of museum display, maybe writers' personal objects are more visually engaging than a page of manuscript, or maybe it's just a French thing about armchairs.

As we're discovering, 18th-century artists' things do survive (armchairs among them), but they're usually lying forgotten in museum store rooms or in the corner of a room. Obviously art works make for much more visually exciting encounters in museums than tatty old domestic objects, but wouldn't people want to see, for instance, the brush that created the canvas? Is Shakespeare's quill really more exciting than Michelangelo's chisel? It left me thinking about how personal possessions survive in the first place, and what role the cult of personality plays in preservation and display.

Lemoyne's Suicide again

I'm presenting my research on François Lemoyne's suicide for the Edgar Wind Society in Oxford this week. I think their event poster has definitely captured the spirit of the thing!

For more on the Edgar Wind Society, you can find information about previous and upcoming events on their website.

Artists' Things online!

 

I'm excited to report that the website for Artists' Things is now launched! Written in collaboration with Katie Scott (Courtauld Institute of Art), Artists' Things is a project that explores the everyday lives and material culture of eighteenth-century France through a study of 'things' that once belonged to artists... from personal possessions (like swords and handkerchiefs) to professional objects (like palettes and colour boxes).

The Artists' Things website is going to be our home base as the project develops. It explains in further detail what the project entails and will provide updates on the research and details of talks and presentations that we're doing in relation to the project.

We also have an email address - so if you have any comments or if you want to suggest any eighteenth-century artists' things that should be included, please get in touch at - artiststhings18c@gmail.com.

A Fête-Dieu Procession in Paris: Now and Then

This is a photo from a Fête-Dieu procession that I took when I was in Paris in June this year. As part of my research on eighteenth-century religious art in Parisian parishes, I've been looking into the history of these processions during the early modern period and so was keen to get some sense of the experience even at this historical remove. The traditionalist parish of Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet is now one of the only parishes left in the city that still performs the ritual.

Fête-Dieu (or Corpus Christi) is a moveable feast of the Roman Catholic Church (and some other Christian churches) celebrated annually in the week after Trinity Sunday (usually falling in May or June). The feast originated as a practice in the thirteenth century, and liturgically it commemorates the ritual of the Eucharist.

By the eighteenth-century, however, the feast day was not only theologically significant, but had also become a key community event in the urban calendar. One of the key rituals associated with the feast is the procession in which the consecrated Host is carried out of the church and into the streets of the parish so that all the community could witness and celebrate the Body of Christ. Each parish had its own procession in which the clergy and congregation would walk through and around the parish, marking its boundaries, and thus celebrating (or at least demarcating) the spaces encompassed by the local community.

Place Dauphine on Turgot's 1739 map of Paris

Fête-Dieu holds significance for art historians of eighteenth-century France because of the material and visual impact of these processions. During this feast, the church was, to a certain extent, turned inside out, as the streets were decorated with banners and paintings to honour the passing Host. Moreover, until the Académie's Salon exhibitions were inaugurated in 1737, Fête-Dieu was also the occasion for the city's only public art exhibition at Place Dauphine, an annual display where artists exhibited their works outside in the square (seen here on Turgot's map at the end of what is now the Île de la Cité).

Contemporary Fête-Dieu Procession route (base map from Google)

As I said at the start, Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet is now the only parish in Paris that still celebrates the feast. I was expecting the route of the procession to mark out the parish boundaries as it did in the eighteenth century, but it seems the procession is no longer a strictly local event. As you can see from the route that I mapped as we walked (left), the Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet procession is far from confined to the 5th arrondissement. It begins at the church, but then makes its way to the Seine, crossing onto the Île de la Cité and then onto the Right Bank. Proceeding along the Quai de l'Hôtel de Ville, it then crosses back onto the Île Saint Louis, stopping briefly at a temporary altar on the Pont de la Tournelle where the host is elevated (with the Cathedral of Notre-Dame as a backdrop - as you can see in the photo below), before the procession moves back into the 5th arrondissement and returns to the church. With hundreds of participants walking and chanting, while altar boys swing incense from thuribles, and little children sprinkle flower petals, the procession, not surprisingly, causes a significant interruption to city life. Stopping traffic as it moves along occupying the full width of streets (for nearly two hours in total), the whole event is controlled by the police with patrol cars and metal barricades strategically placed along the route.

Temporary altar on procession route with Notre-Dame in the background

It was fascinating to witness how this medieval ritual has survived and yet how much it has clearly evolved, not just since the Middle Ages, but since the eighteenth-century... from a local community event in which neighbourhoods came together to celebrate... to a city-wide proclamation of traditionalist Roman Catholic belief which most Parisians now seem to greet with impatience.

The Mysterious Suicide of François Lemoyne

I’m doing the AAH’s Art History in the Pub this month, which means I get another chance to talk about François Lemoyne’s suicide. This has come out of the research I’ve been doing with Katie Scott (Courtauld Institute of Art) on Artists’ Things (website launching soon!) and the material culture of artists in eighteenth-century France. This time I'm focusing a little bit less on the sword itself, and a little bit more on the suicide... and maybe this time, in true CSI:18thC Paris style, the mystery will be solved!

Art History in the Pub is free and open to all. It's at 7:30 on 26th September at The Monarch in Camden. The abstract is below and further details are available on the AAH website.

The Violent Suicide of François Lemoyne

An 18th-Century Art History Mystery

18th-C French Sword - Photo: V&A

Paris, 4 June 1737: the celebrated artist François Lemoyne commits suicide. It started as an ordinary day. Lemoyne had been to his studio to give a lesson to his students and taken a meal with his cousin. But then events took a macabre turn. Lemoyne retired to his bedroom, carefully locked the door, took up his sword, and proceeded to inflict upon his body multiple fatal stab wounds, before dropping to the floor and dying in a pool of blood.

Lemoyne’s death shocked and horrified his family and colleagues, and it has since presented something of a mystery for art historians. Why should this incredibly successful artist – first painter to Louis XV – have wanted to kill himself only months after completing what is now considered his magnum opus: the ceiling of the Apotheosis of Hercules at the Château de Versailles? Was it over money? Professional jealousy? A madness induced by lack of recognition? Could it have been murder? Or if it really was suicide, then how did Lemoyne complete his gruesome task?

With most of the clues now lost deep in the past, some art-historical sleuthing is necessary in order to retrieve the traces. In this paper, I attempt to solve these perplexing mysteries through a forensic and art-historical analysis of the object responsible: Lemoyne’s sword. Using police reports, autopsies, and witness statements, I piece together the final hours of Lemoyne’s life and offer a material reconstruction of the now lost fatal weapon, exploring what Lemoyne’s sword looked like, what he did with it, and what it meant to him. Drawn from a larger study investigating what artists’ personal possessions reveal about their everyday lives, this case explores the limits and possibilities of object-biography, and presents an exercise in recovering the material history of an object when that object no longer materially exists.

Art History in the Pub

The Monarch - Photo Source: Qype

What could be better than an evening of art history? An evening of art history with beer! The ever-enterprising Association of Art Historians has recently launched a new series called Art History in the Pub, a monthly series of talks and presentations by art historians in a London pub (organised by Dr Matt Lodder). Designed as a fun and accessible forum for the communication of art-historical scholarship and the discussion of current debates in the discipline, this is, as the AAH notes, a great way of “bringing the best of cutting-edge art-historical research to a wider community”. I imagine it’s also a great way to spend a Monday evening.

I’ve been invited to speak at the September gathering (on 26 Sept), so I’ll be posting soon about the presentation that I’ll be giving (on the mysterious suicide of François Lemoyne!), but in the meantime, the next Art History in the Pub is on Monday 22 August with Dr. Petra Lange Berndt of UCL, talking about ‘Taxidermy and Colonial Practice’.

Proceedings kick off at 7:30 and the pub is The Monarch (40-42 Chalk Farm Road, Camden, London, NW1 8BG). Entry is free.