HIST 228: The French Revolution (HC)

Ad la de Labille-Guiard (1749-1803), a remarkable portraitist, was among the small number of women ever granted membership in the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture.

From monumental battle paintings to the public display of archaeological spoils, visual culture promoted modern French imperialism. So argues Todd Porterfield in this provocative look at the forces of art and politics in France's military conquest of the Near East. In challenging the conventional wisdom that France happened into imperial venture, Porterfield explores interactions among artists, generals, journalists, curators, and politicians from the time of Napoleon's conquest of Egypt to the Algerian intervention during the Restoration and July Monarchy. Together they forged an official culture that provided a rationale for imperialism - based on images of France's moral and technological superiority - and an enduring project for Frenchmen of all political persuasions during an era of domestic instability. The allure of empire derived in part from its function as an alternative, surrogate, mask, and displacement of the Revolution.

In a long career that spanned the French Revolution and the Bourbon Restoration, Louis-Léopold Boilly (1761-1845) created innovative and daring paintings. This book includes portraiture, scenes of seduction, and groundbreaking representations of raucous Parisian street life. Demonstrates how art functioned within France's rapidly changing political environment.

This intriguing book shows through contemporary prints how Bonaparte was seen from across the English Channel where hostile propaganda was tempered by admiration for his military and administrative talents. Featuring works from the British Museum's world-renowned collection of political satires, including examples by the greatest masters of the genre, James Gillray, Thomas Rowlandson and George Cruikshank, the authors examine in detail these fascinating and humorous prints. French satires showing the British in relation to Bonaparte are also included alongside portraits of Bonaparte and his family made for the British market.

Exhibition catalog of English caricatures about French politics during the Revolution and the Empire. Many of the illustrations include detailed satiric dialog and explanations in English.

Claude-Nicolas Ledoux (1736-1806) is today regarded as a chief representative of French revolutionary architecture. Ledoux's influential buildings and projects are presented and interpreted both aesthetically and historically in this book.

"More than any other artist, Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825) is identified with the dramatic upheaval of the French Revolution. As a politician, he welcomed the promise of social change; as an artist he used his brush to glorify the Revolution's heroes and martyrs. When the political tide changed, David became Napoleon's chief painter, capturing the imperial pomp and contributing to the cult of military heroism."--BOOK JACKET. "In this engrossing account Simon Lee argues that David was the single most important European painter of the age, perfecting a style of dramatic and noble painting that matched exactly the contemporary desire for morally elevating images. A leading exponent of what was to be termed Neoclassicism, David was, however, capable of departing considerably from its ideals of understatement and restraint. Lee's account is the first to trace all aspects of David's career, from his intellectual interests to his entrepreneurial skills and his relationships with patrons."--BOOK JACKET.

France's Empire period, guided by the grand visions of the Emperor Napoleon, was one of the most sumptuous and creative epochs in French art, architecture, and decoration.

This fascinating and elegant book tells the story of five painters at the center of events in Revolutionary France: Jacques Louis-David and his extraordinarily precocious pupils Drouais, Girodet, Gerard, and Gros.

This book examines ephemeral exhibitions from 1750 to 1918. In an era of acceleration and elusiveness, these transient spaces functioned as microcosms in which reality was shown, simulated, staged, imagined, experienced and known. See especially the essay "Jardins-Spectacles: Spaces and Traces of Embodiment."

Portraits were the most widely commissioned paintings in 18th-century France, but most portraits were produced for private consumption, and were therefore seen as inferior to art designed for public exhibition. The French Revolution endowed private values with an unprecedented significance, and the way people responded to portraits changed as a result.

A critical reexamination of Carpeaux's bust Why Born Enslaved! and other nineteenth-century antislavery images--this book interrogates the treatment of the Black figure as a malleable political symbol and locus of exoticized beauty. It unpacks the sculpture's complex and sometimes contradictory engagement with an antislavery discourse.

This remarkable collection of French paintings is put in the context of the institutions that governed the visual arts in the 1700s--the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, the Académie de France à Rome, and the Paris Salon.

Reproduces a swatch book including annotations kept by one of Marie-Antoinette's ladies of the bedchamber. The book also includes an essay on the queen's clothing with many illustrations which provides a larger context for the fabric dress samples.

A history of Germans' attempts to transform society through art in an age of revolution. Alice Goff considers a variety of works--including forty porphyry columns from the tomb of Charlemagne, the Quadriga from the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, the Laocoön group from Rome--following the conflicts over the ownership, interpretation, conservation, and exhibition of German collections during the Napoleonic period and its aftermath.

This richly illustrated book features 170 works by Goya, spanning 30 years. It includes examples from the artist's private albums, in which he recorded his observations, visions and dreams, as well as prepatory drawings made for etched series including the Caprichos, the Disasters of War and the Disparantes. In these uncommissioned drawings and prints Goya had the freedom to create works of 'fantasy and invention', which had no equivalent in the art of his day.

In 1799, when the French artist Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825) exhibited his Intervention of the Sabines, a history painting featuring the ancient heroine Hersilia's Sisters illuminates ways that cultural life and civil society were rebuilt during these years through an extraordinary efflorescence of women pioneers in every cultural domain--literature, the stage, opera, moral philosophy, political theory, painting, popular journalism, and fashion. Available in Print.

Collections from du Musée Carnavalet.

From the Musée du Québec, 1989.

Jacques Louis David's (1748-1825) paintings are among the most iconic in the history of Western art, but little is known about the artist's nearly 2,000 drawings--from quick chalk sketches to exquisite ink compositions enlivened with oil paint--that formed the basis of beloved masterpieces such as The Oath of the Horatii and The Death of Socrates. David helped establish the new French society while documenting the drama, violence, and triumphs of history-in-the-making.

"By offering a comparative study of Jacques-Louis David, the most famous artist of the French Revolution, and Jean-Louis Prieur, a little-known illustrator, this book tracks the political careers of the two artists and offers new insights to the relationship between the arts and the politics of the French Revolution."--BOOK JACKET.

This book focuses on Jacques-Louis David's '€˜Marat', one of the key works of art created during the period of the French Revolution and one of the most important works of Western painting.

This text is accompanied by a web site featuring images, primary documents, and songs. There are over 600 documents in translation as well as more than 200 images on the Web. The authors did a further site to present and analyze images of the French Revolution.

Witness and historian of French society from Louis XVI to Louis Philippe, Boilly offers an abundant variety. This exhibition catalog includes essays by specialists as well as rich visual documentation.

This book explores the fabrication, circulation, and survival of French luxury after the death of the king. Spanning the final years of the ancien régime from the 1790s to the first two decades of the nineteenth century, this richly illustrated book positions luxury within the turbulent politics of dispersal, disinheritance, and dispossession.

From the Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, Paris, 2008.

"Marie-Antoinette has been idolized as embodying the height of eighteenth-century French style, vilified as the spark that ignited the French revolution, and romanticized as France's martyred queen. This book departs from such traditional interpretations of the notorious queen's reign and her historical impact and chooses to reflect on the humanistic aspects of her private realm, her gardens at Trianon, and her passionate curiosity for the natural world." "Marie-Antoinette's entire private domain and its story are told in beautiful photographic detail by Francois Halard and accompanied by well-researched texts by Christian Duvernois for the first time since its recent renovation."--BOOK JACKET.

This luxurious volume captures the spirit that prevailed in the French court during the Empire through the material manifestations of the Imperial Household. More than 250 works of fine and decorative art demonstrate the visual magnificence which was part of a calculated and deliberate effort to fashion a monarchic identity for the new emperor.

"Twice imprisoned after the fall of Robespierre, French painter Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825) faced an artistic and personal crisis as the political and cultural values he had embraced crumbled in the mid-1790s. This book examines the crucial period of David's artistic career as he struggled both to "save his neck" and to recast his identity in the aftermath of the Reign of Terror. Ewa Lajer-Burcharth examines David's work in the context of the larger cultural and social formations emerging in France and offers a new perspective on his paintings and on French artistic culture at an important point in its history."--BOOK JACKET.

Musée des beaux-arts, 2008

François-André Vincent and the Revolution in French painting.

This collection of essays explore the way portraits intersected with politics during the Revolutionary and Imperial Eras in The United States and France. These essays analyze how artists in the United States and France grappled with how abstract notions of individual liberty, delegated powers, and collective governance can be invested in drawn, painted, printed, or mapped likenesses of high-ranking individuals during the Age of Revolution.

This lavish and beautiful catalogue illustrates and discusses fifty-two French drawings dating from the late seventeenth century to the early nineteenth century, all from the Chateau de Versailles, which owns one of the finest collections of French drawings in the world. The catalogue has been prepared to accompany their exhibition at the Wallace Collection in autumn 2006.

Challenges widely held assumptions about both the genre of portraiture and the political and cultural role of images in France at the beginning of the nineteenth century. After 1789, portraiture came to dominate French visual culture because of the Revolution's chief concern: how to turn subjects into citizens. Revolutionary portraits allowed sitters and artists to appropriate the means of representation, both aesthetic and political, and articulate new forms of selfhood and citizenship, often in astonishingly creative ways.

Fourteen essays examine how the French Revolution has been represented in art, literature, and historical narratives from England, France, Germany, and the Caribbean.

How objects associated with the American, French, and Haitian revolutions drew diverse people throughout the Atlantic world into debates over revolutionary ideals. Historian Ashli White explores the circulation of material culture during the American, French, and Haitian revolutions, arguing that in the late eighteenth century, radical ideals were contested through objects as well as in texts.

Following an account of the historical and social contexts of Revolutionary printmaking, the author analyses over 50 works, incorporating scenes such as street singers and fairground performers, unsanctioned Revolutionary events, and the representation of Revolutionary characters in hell. Through analysing these depictions as an ensemble, focusing on style, vocabulary, and metaphor, Claire Trévien shows how prints were a potent vehicle for capturing and communicating partisan messages across the political spectrum. In spite of the intervening centuries, these prints still retain the power to evoke the Revolution like no other source material.

These essays focus on the eclectic objects and forms of visuality that emerged in France from the French Revolution through the end of the July Monarchy in 1848. It offers a new account of French art's modernity by exploring the work of genre painters and miniaturists, sign-painters and animal artists, landscapists, architects, and printmakers, as they found what it meant to be "post-revolutionary."

Popular images of women were everywhere in revolutionary France. Although women's political participation was curtailed, female allegories of liberty, justice, and the republic played a crucial role in the passage from old regime to modern society.

The author analyzes the verbal and visual images of the queen who was portrayed in popular pamphlets from the beginning as a foreign hussy without any sexual morals.

A groundbreaking publication on the Caribbean-born French Neoclassical painter Guillaume Lethière and his extraordinary, yet largely unexamined career Born in the French colony of Guadeloupe, Guillaume Lethière (1760-1832) was a key figure in the history of art during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The son of a formerly enslaved woman of color and a white government official and plantation owner, Lethière moved to France with his father at age fourteen. He trained as an artist and successfully navigated the tumult of the French Revolution and its aftermath in order to achieve the highest levels of recognition in his time. A favorite artist of Napoleon's brother, Lucien Bonaparte, Lethière also held important positions at the Académie de France in Rome, Institut de France , and École des Beaux-Arts.