New Book | Jean-Baptiste-Pierre LeBrun (1748–1813)
From Rowman & Littlefield and available from Artbooks.com:
Bette Oliver, Jean-Baptiste-Pierre LeBrun (1748–1813): In Pursuit of Art (Hamilton Books, 2018), 108 pages, ISBN: 978-0761870272, $65 / £45
Jean-Baptiste Pierre LeBrun’s life was marked by his intense interest in art, first as an artist, and then from 1770 until his death in 1813, as an art dealer/connoisseur and as a participant in the transformation of the Louvre into a national museum during the French Revolution. He managed to accommodate whichever regime assumed power, from monarchy to republic to empire. He married the artist Elisabeth Vigée in 1776, and together they figured prominently in the pre-revolutionary cultural world of Paris. LeBrun travelled widely, buying art for his gallery and contributing to a number of aristocratic collections. His expertise in attributions of 17th-century Dutch and Flemish paintings was acknowledged internationally, while his reference work on the subject was considered the most comprehensive ever written.
LeBrun, the grand-nephew of the illustrious artist Charles LeBrun, became one of the most successful art dealers in Paris. He played an active role in the politics of art between 1789 and 1802, serving as an expert-commissioner in restoration at the national museum. His inventories of artworks, confiscated from all over Europe by Napoleon’s armies, have provided a valuable record of the development of the French national museum. In addition, his inventories have been useful in the identification and recovery of Nazi confiscations during World War II. LeBrun’s accomplishments during a tumultuous period of political and artistic change present evidence of his contributions to the concept of the modern art museum, notably in the areas of conservation, restoration, and arrangement.
Bette W. Oliver of Austin, Texas, is an independent scholar and editor with a PhD in modern European history from the University of Texas at Austin. A specialist in the period of the French Revolution, she is the author of five books focusing on that pivotal period, as well as eleven volumes of poetry.
2016 Dissertation Listings from CAA
My apologies for not posting this much sooner (the listings used to come out in August, and I wasn’t looking for them in December). –CH
From caa.news (11 December 2017) . . .
Once a year, each institution granting the PhD in art history and/or visual studies submits dissertation titles to CAA for publication. caa.reviews has now published the authors and titles of doctoral dissertations in art history and visual studies—both completed and in progress—from American and Canadian institutions for calendar year 2016. You can browse by listing date or by subject matter. Each entry identifies the student’s name, dissertation title, school, and advisor.
The index for 2016 lists four ‘eighteenth-century art’ dissertations completed:
• Joshua D. Hainy, “John Flaxman: Beyond the Line” (Iowa, D. Johnson)
• Stephanie O’Rourke, “Bodies of Knowledge: Fuseli and Girodet at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century” (Columbia, J. Crary)
• Amanda K. Strasik, “Reconceiving Childhood: Women and Children in French Art, 1750–1814” (Iowa, D. Johnson)
• Aaron Wile, “Painting, Authority, and Experience at the Twilight of the Grand Siècle, 1688–1721” (Harvard, E. Lajer-Burcharth)
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and thirty-six ‘eighteenth-century art’ dissertations in progress, including:
• Daniella Berman, “Aesthetics of Contingency: History and the Unfinished Paintings of the French Revolution” (IFA/NYU, T. Crow)
• Christine Brandner, “Addressing another Body in Jean-Etienne Liotard’s Portraiture” (Yale, N. Suthor)
• Alexandra Cardon, “Circa 1700: Royal Retreats, Academic Unrest and the Roots of Rococo” (CUNY, J. Sund)
• Alicia Caticha, “Étienne-Maurice Falconet and the Matter of Sculpture: Marble, Porcelain, and Sugar in Eighteenth-Century Paris” (Virginia, S. Betzer)
• Elizabeth Gebauer, “The Art of Speech: Flemish Baroque Pulpits, 1627–1794” (Princeton, T. DaCosta Kaufmann)
• Sandra Gomez Todo, “Abandoned Schools of Pleasure: Unmasking Gender and Identity in the Visual Culture of the Georgian Masquerade” (Iowa, D. Johnson)
• Christine Griffiths, “From Garden to Toilette: Cultivating Perfume in Early Modern England” (Bard Graduate Center, D. Krohn)
• Rachel Harmeyer, “After Angelica Kauffman” (Rice, L. Costello)
• Julia K. McHugh, “Dressing Andean Spaces: Textiles, Painting, and Architecture in the Colonial Imagination” (UCLA, C. Villaseñor-Black)
• Isabel Oleas-Mogollón, “Jesuit Missionary and Visionary Experiences in Quito: La Compañía Prophet Paintings” (Delaware, M. Domínguez Torres)
• Emily Spratt, “Byzantium not Forgotten: Constructing the Artistic and Cultural Legacy of an Empire between East and West in the Early Modern Period” (Princeton, P. Brown)
• Amy Torbert, “Dissolving the Bonds: Sayer & Bennett, Print Publishers in an Age of Revolution” (Delaware, W. Bellion)
• Linda Zajac, “Miniature Worlds of Age and Masculinity in the Eighteenth-Century English Domestic Interior” (University of Victoria, E. Campbell)
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