Writing (selected)
Peer-reviewed
“Ingres, Raphael and the ‘tableaux de tapisserie’ in Meaux Cathedral,” The Burlington Magazine, August 2023.
A newly discovered report brings to light a failed attempt by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780–1867) to transfer to the Louvre a set of copies after Raphael’s designs featuring the Acts of the Apostles. Made in the late seventeenth century by the first pensionaries at the French Academy in Rome, who used the corresponding tapestries as their models, the copies in oil reproduce the designs known as the Raphael Cartoons (Victoria & Albert Museum, London). Dubbed “tableaux de tapisserie,” the paintings came to decorate the Cathédrale Saint-Étienne in Meaux, where they caught the attention of Ingres in the early 1820s. His campaign to bolster the collections of the Louvre with the copies underscores the prioritization of the Italian school in Restoration-era France and the museum’s significant role in arbitrating this process.
“A forgotten painter at the Impressionist exhibitions: ‘Jacques François’ or the Marquise de Rambures (1844–1924),” The Burlington Magazine, September 2021.
This article identifies the woman Impressionist hitherto known only as “Jacques François.” Although a participant in the Impressionist exhibitions of 1876, 1877, and 1886, the pseudonymous artist has remained a forgotten figure at the margins of Impressionism’s history. One of only five women to participate in the Impressionist exhibitions, Louise Amour Marie de La Roche de Fontenilles, Marquise de Rambures (1844–1924) complicates the history of the avant-garde circle and opens multiple new lines of inquiry.
Exhibition catalogues
“Le Roi de la forêt et la célébrité paradoxale de Rosa Bonheur,” in Rosa Bonheur. Paris: Flammarion/Éditions Musée d’Orsay, 2022.
By the time Rosa Bonheur painted Le Roi de la forêt (1878), the artist had received dozens of accolades and enjoyed an international reputation as the preeminent painter in the animalier genre throughout the United States, England, and western Europe. Yet Bonheur had long ceased exhibiting new work in France, much to the chagrin of Parisian critics and to the confusion of the public. Exhibited only in Antwerp, London, and Chicago, Le Roi de la forêt underscored her turn away from the Salon and French art world, and towards other stages and markets abroad. This essay will not only retrace the making and reception of Le Roi de la forêt—which earned Bonheur an honor from King Leopold in Belgium and spurred her promotion from chevalière to officière in the French Legion of Honor—but also reexamine the delicate dynamics of artistic celebrity in the late nineteenth-century world.
“A Selected History: Science, Colour, Art” and “Artists’ Biographies,” in Colours of Impressionism: Masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay. University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press for the National Gallery of Singapore, 2018 (multiple editions).
One of the great innovations of the Impressionists was their radical use of colour: their application of strokes of complementary or contrasting hues captured the shifting effects of light and foregrounded the nature of vision. The development of Impressionism and its poetics of resistance are traced in Colours of Impressionism: Masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay, which brings together celebrated works from Impressionist masters. Using colour as the lens through which to magnify the movement’s intricacies, this catalogue sweeps us from Manet’s rich blacks, through green and blue landscapes of Monet and Cézanne, to the sensuous pinks of Renoir. In the process of this journey, scientific discoveries emerge and definitions of modernity are expanded, illuminating these artists’ radical tendencies to disavow preconceptions of art. (Publisher’s description.)
Dissertation
Copying at the Louvre. Yale University, 2019.
Copying at the Louvre examines one of the most ubiquitous and formative artistic practices of nineteenth-century France. It argues for the copy made in the museum as a project that complicates long-standing narratives of painterly production. At the French museum this practice was fundamentally revolutionary: unlike studying in Rome, painting within the walls of the museum implicated the copyist into an art history constructed by an institutional matrix susceptible to change. Yet derision of the copy since the eighteenth century has all but elided its nuances and perpetuated instead strict, pejorative, and inconsistent historical definitions. By juxtaposing the history of the Louvre and the collections it presented with the copies produced there, this study offers a new framework for considering the basic exercise of painting after painting and the wide-ranging possibilities it entailed for all artists, men and women. In doing so, the dissertation also re-examines the customary opposition between the reproduction and the original. Through case studies organized in a roughly chronological order, this dissertation explores the plurality, the engagement with Old Masters through medium, the development of painterly identity, and the rehearsing of originality enabled by the copy painted at the Louvre.