Which Paris art-world figures were directly linked to the plantations of Saint-Domingue?
How far did colonial networks extend through the elite social circles of Paris and Versailles?
Which artworks were products of these colonial connections, and where are they now?
This branch of the Colonial Networks project explores answers to these questions through archival research and digital approaches to mapping, data visualization, and storytelling. Our aims are not only to reveal these buried colonial connections, but also to show how they change our understanding of eighteenth-century art and to consider their legacies today.
Digital Mapping and Data Visualization
- Building a picture of Paris art-world figures who owned plantations in Haiti/Saint-Domingue and visualizing these colonial connections as socio-economic networks
- Mapping properties in Haiti/Saint-Domingue and Paris to explore links between land ownership and enslavement in the French colony and artistic production and consumption in the metropole
- Retrieving artworks made or collected by plantation-owning art collectors, artists, and architects to tell new stories about well-known paintings, sculptures, decorative objects, and buildings
We aim to produce and make freely available datasets, archival documents, interactives, and other outputs that grant access to these histories for research, teaching, and other uses.
Museum Collaborations
Many of the artworks from these Parisian collections are now in major museums – the National Gallery and Wallace Collection in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Musée du Louvre in Paris – and in other collections around the world.
The colonial histories of these artworks are crucial stories that museums want to tell in ways that are meaningful and relevant to diverse audiences. But the complex lives of objects and their interconnected provenance histories make these challenging stories to communicate within the gallery or even within a single instritution.
We are collaborating with curators and museum professionals to explore the possibilities that digital spaces present for confronting these challenges.
Other Links
- Linked Lives: a film project that emerged out our year-long collaboration with the National Gallery in London
- Unsettling Collections: a collaborative workshop with curators and collections researchers