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Artists and the city: mapping the art worlds of eighteenth-century Paris

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 April 2018

HANNAH WILLIAMS
HANNAH WILLIAMS*
Affiliation:
School of History, Queen Mary University of London, London, E1 4NS, UK
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Abstract:

Paris is renowned for artistic neighbourhoods like Montmartre and Montparnasse in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But for earlier periods, the art-historical picture is much vaguer. Where did artists live and work in the eighteenth century? Which neighbourhoods formed the cultural geography of the early modern art world? Drawing on data from a large-scale digital mapping project locating the addresses of hundreds of eighteenth-century artists, this article answers these crucial questions of urban art history. Following an overview of the digital project, the article explores three different mappings of the city's art worlds: a century long survey of the neighbourhoods inhabited by the Academy's artists; a comparison of where the Guild's artists were living in a single year and a wider world view of Parisian artists abroad. Through its new cartographic models of Paris's art worlds, this article brings the city to the foreground of eighteenth-century French art.

Type
Research Article
Information
Urban History , Volume 46 , Issue 1 , February 2019 , pp. 106 - 131
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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Footnotes

*

Research for this article was funded by The Leverhulme Trust. This article benefited greatly from insightful comments by Colin Jones, Keren Hammerschlag, Mia Ridge and the readers and editor of Urban History. Thanks also to Chris Sparks for his collaboration on Artists in Paris: Mapping the Eighteenth-Century Art World and help creating maps for this article.

References

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2 Most comprehensive in this regard is Milner, Studios of Paris. Numerous exhibitions and publications are devoted to specific neighbourhoods, for example: Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre, exhib. cat. (Washington and Chicago, 2005); Buisson, S. and Parisot, C., Paris Montmartre: A Mecca of Modern Art, 1860–1920, trans. M. Wyllie (Paris, 1996)Google Scholar; Valadon, Utrillo & Utter: In the Rue Cortot Studio, 1912–1926, exhib. cat. (Paris, 2015); G.P. Weisberg (ed.), Montmartre and the Making of Mass Culture (New Brunswick, 2001); Esprit Montmartre: Bohemian Life in Paris around 1900, exhib. cat. (Frankfurt, 2014); Bougault, Valérie, Paris Montparnasse: The Heyday of Modern Art, 1910–1940 (Paris, 1997)Google Scholar; Paris au temps des Impressionistes, 1848–1914, exhib. cat. (Paris, 2011).

3 Examples include books and guides such as Williams, E., The Impressionists’ Paris: Walking Tours of the Painters’ Studios, Homes, and the Sites they Painted (New York, 1997)Google Scholar; Williams, E., Picasso's Paris: Walking Tours of the Artists’ Life in the City (New York, 1999)Google Scholar; Delorme, J.-C. and Dubois, A.-M., Ateliers d'artistes à Paris (Paris, 2015)Google Scholar.

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5 Exceptions include Crow, T., Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris (London and New Haven, 1985), 45–74Google Scholar; Wrigley, R., ‘Between the street and the salon: Parisian shop signs and the spaces of professionalism in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries’, Oxford Art Journal, 21 (1998), 45–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Clay, R., Iconoclasm in Revolutionary Paris: The Transformation of Signs (Oxford, 2012)Google Scholar; and Sophie Raux's work on the Pont-Notre-Dame, www.artmarkets.eu. On the city in cultural history, see Lilti, A., ‘Espace urbain, espace mondain: Paris et la sociabilité mondaine au XVIIIe siècle’, in Béguin, K. and Dautresme, O. (eds.), La ville et l'esprit de société (Tours, 2004), 111–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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8 H. Williams and C. Sparks, Artists in Paris: Mapping the Eighteenth-Century Art World, www.artistsinparis.org accessed 29 Jan. 2018. This digital mapping project was funded by The Leverhulme Trust and supported by Queen Mary University of London.

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10 A small number practiced independently with royal protection. On the profession of artist see: Guichard, C., ‘Arts libéraux et arts libres à Paris au XVIIIe siècle: peintres et sculpteurs entre corporation et Académie royale’, Revue d'histoire modern et contemporaine, 49 (2002/03), 54–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Heinich, N., Du peintre à l'artiste. Artisans et académiciens à l’âge classique (Paris, 1993)Google Scholar.

11 École normale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, MS 21.

12 The Almanachs Royaux and the Almanachs Nationaux have been digitized by the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

13 Exceptions include 1711, 1712 and 1792, for which no source of addresses has yet been found; there are also occasional gaps for individuals when no address was recorded in a given year.

14 For the archivist Jules Guiffrey's masterful efforts to reconstruct Guild membership, see Guiffrey, J., Histoire de l'Académie de Saint-Luc (Paris, 1915), 158–484Google Scholar.

15 Lebrun, Abbé, Almanach historique et raisonné des architectes, peintres, sculpteurs, graveurs et cizeleurs (Paris, 1776)Google Scholar.

16 On Paris's urban transformation, see ALPAGE. Analyse diachronique de l'espace urbain Parisian: approche géomatique, http://alpage.huma-num.fr/en/ accessed 30 Jan. 2018.

17 The historical maps were georeferenced using Map Warper and the contemporary base layer is from OpenStreetMap.

18 On house numbering, see Tanter, A., ‘Addressing the houses: the introduction of house numbering in Europe’, Histoire et Mesure, 24 (2009), 7–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Denis, V., ‘Les Parisiens, la police et les numérotages des maisons, du XVIIIe à l'Empire’, French Historical Studies, 38 (2015), 83–103CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 On the making of Artists in Paris, see H. Williams, ‘Artists’ studios in Paris: digitally mapping the eighteenth-century art world’, Journal18, 5 (Spring 2018), www.journal18.org.

20 On the locations of the Academy, see Williams, H., Académie Royale: A History in Portraits (Farnham, 2015), 22, 122Google Scholar.

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22 On trade neighbourhoods in Paris, see Kaplow, J., The Names of Kings: The Parisian Laboring Poor in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1972), 3–26Google Scholar; and Garrioch, D., The Making of Revolutionary Paris (Los Angeles, 2002), 15–44Google Scholar.

23 On a later sub-community of sculptors on the city outskirts, see Bresc-Bautier, G., ‘Fonderie et ateliers du Roule’, in de Andia, B. (ed.), La Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré (Paris, 1994), 372–7Google Scholar.

24 The first logement was granted in 1608. The most comprehensive study of artists living in the Louvre is still Guiffrey, ‘Logements d'artistes’.

25 On the Galerie's inhabitants in the 1670s, see Ronfort, J.-N. and Augarde, J.-D., ‘Les Galeries du Louvre’, in André Charles Boulle, 1642–1732. Un nouveau style pour l'Europe (Paris, 2009), 25–6Google Scholar.

26 Grivel, Le commerce de l'estampe, 59–62.

27 On Quai de l'Horloge, see Hillairet, J., Dictionnaire historique des rues de Paris, vol. I (Paris, 1985), 640–7Google Scholar.

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34 Glorieux, G., À l'enseigne de Gersaint: Edmé-François Gersaint, marchand d'art sur le Pont-Notre-Dame (Paris, 2002)Google Scholar; Szanto, M., ‘The Pont Notre Dame, heart of the picture trade in France (16th–18th centuries)’, in de Marchi, N. and Raux, S. (eds.), Moving Pictures: Intra-European Trade in Images, 16th–18th Centuries (Turnhout, 2014)Google Scholar.

35 Guiffrey, Histoire de l'Académie de Saint-Luc, 434.

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37 Procès-Verbaux de l'Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture (Paris, 1888), vol. VIII, 76, vol. IX, 107, 154.

38 Mansfield, Perfect Foil, 23–45.

39 On the French Academy in Rome, see 350 ans de creation: les artistes de l'Académie de France à Rome de Louis XIV à nos jours, exhib. cat. (Milan, 2016).

40 American artists working in eighteenth-century London include, for example, Benjamin West and John Singleton Copley.