Posts in Category: presentation

Academic Culture & Competition in Early Modern Europe

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.

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.

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.