H-France Salon Webinar on Patricia Smyth’s book Paul Delaroche: Painting and Popular Spectacle
- Region: All Regions
- Type: Talk
- Cost: Free
You are warmly invited to join Patricia Smyth for a webinar hosted by H-France Salon in which she talks about her book Paul Delaroche: Painting and Popular Spectacle, published by Liverpool University Press, 2022.
Zoom, 3pm GMT/10am Eastern Time (US and Canada), Wednesday 24 January 2024.
Delaroche’s paintings caused a sensation at the Paris Salon, with critics comparing the emotional response they elicited to that of popular melodrama. Yet his appeal to a certain type of spectator lay behind the increasingly hostile criticism to which his works were subjected, and has in our own time led to his uncertain status in the art historical canon. This book focuses on Delaroche’s appeal to a newly expanded, more socially diverse audience. Lacking in specialist knowledge, but nevertheless keen to engage with and deeply affected by art, the behaviour of this new public prompted lively discussions about who has the right to judge art and on what grounds.
This interdisciplinary study proposes a new reading both of Delaroche and of the connections between the arts in this period. The artist emerges as a figure at the cutting edge of an emergent trans-medial popular visual culture in which we see the formation of modern spectatorship.
Patricia Smyth is an art historian and Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Warwick. Her research interests are in nineteenth-century art, theatre, and spectatorship. She was the Ampersand Foundation/Association for Art History Art Historian in Residence, 2022-23 and is co-editor of the journal Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film.
She will be joined by colleagues from art history and theatre history:
Emma Barker is an art historian and Senior Lecturer at the Open University. She has published widely on eighteenth and nineteenth-century art and is currently working on art and blindness in France from the ancien régime to the modern era. She is author of Greuze and the Painting of Sentiment (2005).
Nina Lübbren is Associate Professor of film and art history at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, UK. She is the author of Narrative Painting in Nineteenth-Century Europe (2023) and of Rural Artists’ Colonies in Europe, 1870-1910, and the co-editor of Visual Culture and Tourism and Painting and Narrative in France. She is currently writing a book on women sculptors in Germany, 1910-1933.
Janice Norwood is a theatre historian and Visiting Research Fellow in Literature at the University of Hertfordshire, UK, having previously been a Senior Lecturer. Her research focuses on nineteenth-century popular theatre and culture. She is the author of Victorian Touring Actresses (2020). She is a co-editor of the journal Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film.
Caroline Radcliffe is a theatre historian and reader in Drama and Performance at the University of Birmingham, UK. She has written widely on nineteenth-century theatre and cultural history with her work frequently intersecting performance, art history and music. Recent publications include two scholarly editions of dramas by Wilkie Collins, The Lighthouse, and The Red Vial. Caroline is currently completing a monograph for Routledge on Collins’s dramas.
Time: Jan 24, 2024 10:00 AM Eastern Time (US and Canada)/ 3 PM UK
Join Zoom Meeting
https://umass-amherst.zoom.us/j/95593856163?pwd=dGlla3ZtNDIyZ2Q5b1Mrb0ttc1BIZz09
Meeting ID: 955 9385 6163
Passcode: 815978