Posts in Category: Académie Royale

Academic Culture & Competition in Early Modern Europe

On 27th March 2013 by Hannah Williams With 0 Comments - 17th century, Académie Royale, art, artists, conference, Paris, portraiture, presentation

This year’s Early Modern Research Centre colloquium at the University of Reading is on the culture of competition in Europe’s Academies. I will be giving a paper on the culture of institutional competition that drove artistic production in 17th-century Paris (a short abstract follows below), which is drawn from my book, Académie Royale: A History in Portraits (due out next year).

http://www.reading.ac.uk/emrc/events/emrc-events.aspx

Le Brun vs Mignard / Academy vs Guild 
Hannah Williams

My paper explores the culture of institutional competition in seventeenth-century Paris through a case study of a bitter personal rivalry between two artists: Charles Le Brun, director of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, and Pierre Mignard, head of the Maîtrise or city guild of artists. Through a close study of the portraits painted by and of these two great figureheads, I argue that Le Brun and Mignard’s antagonism not only spurred productive competition between the two schools, but also became a driving personal motivation as each artist came to define himself through and against the other.

The Louvre Before the Louvre

On 27th October 2012 by Hannah Williams With 0 Comments - 17th century, 18th century, Académie Royale, artists, Louvre, Paris, sociability, social networks

Just posting here the call for papers for a conference on artistic sociability in the early modern Louvre, which I am organising with Mia Jackson (QMUL) at the Wallace Collection next year.

We’ve both come at this from quite different perspectives – Mia from her research on the ébéniste, André-Charles Boulle, who lived in the Louvre and kept his collection of prints and drawings there; and me from research into the social networks of artists in my work on the Académie Royale (also housed in the Louvre) and on 18C artists’ local parishes (the Louvre being one of the liveliest artistic neighbourhoods). But our goal is the same: exploring what the Louvre was like before it became a museum, getting into all its nooks and crannies, retrieving its inhabitants, and basically bringing the old pre-Revolutionary Louvre back to life!

The response has already been great and we’re very excited to see it take shape.

THE LOUVRE BEFORE THE LOUVRE
Artisans, Artists, Academies
The Wallace Collection, London
5 July 2013
CALL FOR PAPERS – DEADLINE 15 Jan 2013

Now one of the world’s best-known museums, the Louvre was once a vast artistic and cultural centre of a different kind. ‘The Louvre before the Louvre’ will delve into the fascinating but little known period of the Louvre’s history from 1643 to 1793, exploring the role this space played in the histories of art production and artistic sociability in early modern Paris.

Even before Louis XIV moved the Court from the Louvre to Versailles in 1682, the Louvre had already become the centre of artistic, creative, and intellectual energy in Paris. Artists and artisans of all trades – from watch-makers to history painters – were given lodgings and studio space in the same wings and corridors that accommodated cultural organs like the Menus Plaisirs du Roi (responsible for state festivities and spectacles), the royal printing press, and the royal academies (Painting and Sculpture, Architecture, Inscriptions, Science, and the Académie Française). As the palace expanded over the next two centuries, the Louvre complex (the building and surrounding streets) came to be dominated by this growing community of artists, artisans, men of letters, and their aristocratic patrons, inhabiting this space and living out their daily lives together.

‘The Louvre before the Louvre’ will reconstruct and re-evaluate this space of artistic sociability. As dust billowed and paint dripped in artists’ studios, theoretical debates were thrashed out in the academies, and groundbreaking technologies were designed in artisans’ workshops, the Louvre became a fertile ground for collaboration, the results of which are evident in many objects (e.g. by Boulle, Oppenordt, Oeben, Boucher, Oudry, Girardon, Coysevox, to name a few) now in the Wallace Collection where this conference will take place.

Seeking a more intimate understanding of the artistic and intellectual ‘neighbourhood’ of the Louvre and its effect on art and design in the period, we invite papers that explore the Louvre’s rich history, art, material objects, spaces, and social interactions during the 17th and 18th centuries. Suggested topics may include but are not limited to:

  • Artistic and intellectual circles (the lives of the Royal Academies & their academicians)
  • Living in the Louvre (artists’ logements/studios; social order & daily life; professional/social interactions; individual and collaborative practice)
  • Form and function of Louvre spaces (key sites: Galerie d’Apollon, Salon Carré, Grande Galerie, theatres, chapels, etc)
  • Patronage Networks (patrons and collectors in the Louvre)
  • Decoration & Display (furnishing and decoration by Louvre inhabitants; displays of collections; exhibitions)
  • Louvre Experiences (written and visual descriptions of life in the Louvre)
  • Finding boundaries – where did the artistic communities of the Louvre begin and end? How did one ‘belong’ to the Louvre community? What did it mean to do so?

Please send proposals of no more than 300 words to amelia.f.jackson@gmail.com (Queen Mary University of London) and hannah.williams@hoa.ox.ac.uk (University of Oxford) by 15 Jan 2013.

For further information:
http://www.wallacecollection.org/education/research/forthcomingconferences

Artists’ Things on the road

On 11th April 2012 by Hannah Williams With 0 Comments - 18th century, Académie Royale, artists, conference, Jean-Antoine Houdon, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, things

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.

Art’s Insiders: New Histories of Europe’s Academies

On 1st July 2011 by Hannah Williams With 0 Comments - AAH, Académie Royale, conference, Royal Academy

I’m organising a session with my colleague Keren Hammerschlag exploring new histories of Europe’s art academies at the 2012 Association of Art Historians (AAH) conference, which is going to be held next March at the Open University in Milton Keynes.

Courtauld Gallery’s ‘Art on the Line’ Royal Academy exhibition in 2001 (Photo: Courtauld Gallery)

Our aim is to re-interpret the place of academies in the early modern art world, and to start re-conceptualising the histories that have been constructed of these institutions in art history. Here’s the call for papers (submissions due by 7 November 2011):

For centuries, institutions like the Royal Academy in London, the Académie Royale (later the Académie des Beaux Arts) in Paris, and the Accademia di San Luca in Rome were the epicentres of European art practice, theory and education. For artists, having the letters ‘RA’ after their name, or the opportunity to show works at the Salons or the Summer Exhibitions promised elevated social standing and commercial success. As institutions, Academies developed principles and ideals that dominated artistic production throughout the period. In art history, however, the ‘Academy’ has been variously recast as staid, kitsch and archaic. According to critics, ‘academic’ art represents the inert centre against which avant-garde innovation and originality was pitted. But in their time, Europe’s Academies were anything but static or homogenous. Established by groups of artists resisting under-developed or conservative attitudes to art, these communities often began as innovative alternatives; they were home to radical new approaches, and became sites of heated debate in response to political, theoretical and social shifts.

This session seeks a re-evaluation of art’s insiders. What did it mean to be at the centre of these powerful institutions? And how can we effectively revisit the Academy without falling into the trap of reviving dead, white, male, bourgeois artists? We invite proposals for papers that take a new look at the ‘Academy’ and academicians in the period 1600 to 1900. Papers might address issues of gender, social networks, individual and collective identity, educational practices, centre and periphery (eg. regional academies), in-groups and rivalries, competition and emulation, successes and failures. In particular we invite papers informed by sociological, anthropological and cultural theory approaches, which take art objects as their focus.

For more information on our session click here, and for other sessions at the conference click here.