Portraits of Artists and the Social Commerce of Friendship in Eighteenth- Century France.

This dissertation examines the roles that portraits of artists played in the social commerce of friendship in the ancien régime of eighteenth-century France. While scholarship on portraiture of the period tends to emphasize a single artist’s work or representations of powerful and well-known patrons, this study moves away from a monographic approach and brings a heterogeneous group of works together to show how different forms and types of portraits of artists were generated by ideas and practices of friendships. The study assembles a rich visual corpus, including pastel portraits, small medallion drawings, caricatures, group portraits, and hybrid genre-portraits, which are typically discussed separately in art historical studies. They were created by a range of artists from history painters such as Carle Vanloo and François-André Vincent, draughtsmen such as Charles-Nicolas Cochin, pastellists such as Maurice Quentin de la Tour to female painters such as Adélaïde Labille-Guiard. I argue that portraits served tactical and strategic purposes through their exchange between artists, between artists and patrons, and their display for the viewing public. The study compares this diverse body of portraits to the morceaux de réception portraits commissioned by the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture that defined the institution visually and enforced its inner hierarchy. By using the morceaux portraits as a foil, the study highlights the different purposes that portraits of artists served outside official structures of artistic production: as personal gifts, mementos of international travel created by young artists, and assertions of participation in the salons of the Enlightenment. The word “friend” and the concept of “friendship” are analyzed through primary source documents as self-conscious constructions of social interactions in the eighteenth century, no less so than the portraits themselves. Salon criticism, letters, journals, and published discussions of friendship are used to demonstrate that there were different valences of friendship and that these affected the formats, iconographies, and media of portraits and how and where they circulated. By considering portraiture as a social practice, this study provides new insight into the role of friendship in the lives of eighteenth-century artists and the effects those friendships had on artistic production.PHDHistory of ArtUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/94079/1/jfripp_1.pd