Provenance Stories: Colonial Networks and the Paris Art World

In this talk, Professors Meredith Martin and Hannah Williams explore different aspects of a multimedia research project that is devoted to uncovering the deep, mostly unknown colonial connections that underlie some of France's most celebrated art collections. Their project originated in an unexpected discovery: eighteenth-century property maps of the French colony of Saint-Domingue (Haiti) that read like a "who's who" of the Paris art world, revealing scores of mostly absentee plantation owners who were also prominent art collectors, patrons, and artists. Through extensive archival and provenance research, Martin and Williams have traced numerous art collections that were built on the profits on enslaved labor, dispersed during the French and Haitian Revolutions (c. 1789–1804), and reside now in public museums around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Wallace Collection, the Louvre, and the Detroit Institute of Arts. 

Currently, Martin and Williams are co-directing a collaborative multimedia project entitled Colonial Networks: Remapping the “Paris” Art World in Haiti-Saint-Domingue, which explores links between Haiti and the Paris art world during the late 18^th and early 19^th Centuries. Their research has been supported by the Kress Foundation and the Getty Research Institute.

Image captions: 

François-Hubert Drouais, The Comte de Vaudreuil, 1758. The National Gallery, London

Jean-Antoine Watteau, The Pleasures of the Ball, c. 1715-17. Dulwich Picture Gallery, London