Daniel Harkett will be coming to speak at the Françoise and Georges Selz Lectures on 18th- and 19th-Century French Decorative Arts and Culture on Tuesday, January 29, 2013. His talk is entitled “The Studio and the Salon: Artists, Masculinity, and Sociability in the Early Nineteenth Century.”

Daniel Harkett is Assistant Professor of History of Art and Visual Culture at the Rhode Island School of Design. He received his undergraduate degree in History of Art from the University of Edinburgh and his M.A. and Ph.D. in History of Art and Architecture from Brown University. Harkett’s research focuses primarily on art, performance, music, and salon culture in post-revolutionary France.

His publications include: “Illusions of Power: The Diorama and the Royalist Press in Restoration Paris,” Visual Resources 22:1 (March 2006): 33-52; “Revelation, Narrative, Rupture: Viewing David in Restoration Paris,” in David After David: Essays on the Later Work, Mark Ledbury, ed., (Williamstown, MA: Clark Art Institute in association with Yale University Press, 2007); and “The Giraffe’s Keepers and the (Dis)play of Difference,” in Of Pictures and Specimens: Natural History in Post-Revolutionary and Restoration France, Sue Ann Prince, ed. (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, expected publication 2012). Harkett is currently working on a book-length project entitled, Tableaux Vivants: Salons, Sociability, and Visual Culture in Post-Revolutionary France.

After the fall of Napoleon in 1815, France witnessed a revival of salon sociability. In the fractious environment of the Restoration, salons seemed—to their participants—capable of healing the psychic wounds of the Revolution, uniting the French elite, and modeling a new form of politics. Within France’s revitalized salon culture, artists played important roles as participants, hosts, and fabricators of salon imagery. A particularly prominent figure was François Gérard, who painted pictures that framed and gave meaning to salons, while also maintaining his own salon, where a range of visitors gathered to talk and to view his works. In this conjunction of artistic and sociable activities, Gérard brought together scripts for masculine and feminine performance and crafted an identity for himself as a composer of social groups.

Light refreshments will be served at 5:45 pm. The presentation will begin at 6:00 pm.

RSVP is required.

PLEASE NOTE that our Lecture Hall can only accommodate a limited number of people, so please come early if you would like to have a seat in the main room. We also have overflow seating available; all registrants who arrive late will be seated in the overflow area.