Portraiture and Friendship in Enlightenment France examines how new and often contradictory ideas about friendship were enacted in the lives of artists in the eighteenth century. It demonstrates that portraits resulted from and generated new ideas about friendship by analyzing the creation, exchange, and display of portraits alongside discussions of friendship in philosophical and academic discourse, exhibition criticism, personal diaries, and correspondence. This study provides a deeper understanding of how artists took advantage of changing conceptions of social relationships and used portraiture to make visible new ideas about friendship that were driven by Enlightenment thought.

 

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I am co-editor of  Artistes, savants et amateurs: art et sociabilité au XVIIIe siècle (1715-1815) (Éditions Mare et Martin, 2016). This volume grew out of an interdisciplinary conference that I co-organized at the Institut national d’histoire de l’art in 2011 on the subject of art and sociability. It brought together forty-five established scholars and graduate students from six countries working in diverse fields including art history, history, musicology, and French literature for three days of discussion. My own contribution to the volume, “Friendship at the Salon,” addresses how a public desire to see artists as sociable people led artists to exhibit intimate pastel portraits that promoted their amicable relationships with Enlightenment celebrities. This inquiry into informal portraiture and the use-value of extra-Academic relationships for artists’ self-promotion addresses an area of art historical research that has been largely neglected in favor of court portraits by canonical artists.

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