Now one of the world’s most famous museums, the Louvre was once a vast artistic and cultural centre of a different kind. This one-day conference addresses the fascinating but little-known period of the Louvre’s history throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, exploring the role this space, its objects, and its inhabitants played in the histories of art production and artistic sociability in early modern Paris.

Eminent and emerging scholars including two guest speakers from the Musée du Louvre will together provide an intimate understanding of the artistic and intellectual neighbourhood of the Louvre and its effect on art and design in the period. Papers on the day will investigate the collective spaces and sociable practices of the Louvre (from the royal academies to artists’ studios), the intersections between personal and professional spaces for the artists and artisans who both lived and worked in the Louvre, and the wider significance of the Louvre in artistic social networks both locally and internationally.

Taking place in the Wallace Collection, which houses one of the United Kingdom’s finest collections of art from this period, this conference offers attendees the opportunity to experience the results of these artistic collaborations.

Convenors : Mia Jackson (QMUL) and Hannah Williams (University of Oxford)

Generously supported by the Wallace Collection and the Faculty of History of the University of Oxford.

Programme

Welcome : Christoph Vogtherr (Wallace Collection)

Introduction : Mia Jackson (QMUL) and Hannah Williams (University of Oxford)

I. Guest Speakers from the Louvre
Reception Pieces at the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture : New Research
Geneviève Bresc-Bautier (Musée du Louvre) : Integration of Works into the Collections of the Académie during the Ancien Régime
Guilhem Scherf (Musée du Louvre) : Reception and Diffusion of the Morceaux de Réception during the Ancien Régime

II. Collective Spaces & Sociable Practices
Drew Armstrong (University of Pittsburgh) : Life and Loss in the Académie Royale d’Architecture
Esther Bell (Cincinnati Art Museum) : Coypel the Curator : Studio as Sociable Space
Pierre-Édouard Latouche (Université de Québec à Montréal) : Des Recueils des Maisons Royales en Petit (1745) à L’Architecture Française (1756) de Blondel : Le remploi d’un Plan de la Cour Carré
Anne Higonnet (Barnard College, Columbia University) : Studios, Sociability, and Unexpected Consequences in the Old Louvre

III. Living and Working in the Louvre
Susan Wager (Columbia University) : Un-occupying the Louvre : The Royal Gem-Engraver Jacques Guay
David Maskill (Victoria University of Wellington) : Louis Tocqué (1696-1772) : A Portrait Painter at the Louvre
Katie Scott (Courtauld Institute of Art) : Parade’s End : On Charles Coypel’s Bed

IV. Neighbourhoods and Networks
Dena Goodman (University of Michigan) : 4 rue des Orties : the Louvre of the Silvestres, 1675-1805
Bärbel Küster (State Academy for Art and Design, Stuttgart) : Britons in the Louvre in the 18th Century
Laura Auricchio (The New School) : Beyond the Louvre : Re-mapping the Paris Art World in the Age of Louis XVI