AAH

Call for Papers - 'Dickens and the Visual Imagination'

An international two-day conference to celebrate the bicentenary of Charles Dickens in 2012
9-10 July 2012

Call for Papers - 'Surviving the Middle Ages: Art, Belief, and Preservation'

17th Annual Medieval Postgraduate Student Colloquium
Monday 6 February 2012

Kenneth Clark Lecture Theatre, The Courtauld Institute of Art
Somerset House, Strand, London WC2

Workshop - 'Terrorism, liberation and the spectacle of hyper-masculinity'

Saturday 12th and Sunday 13th November 2011
Terrorist Transgressions: network on the gendered representations of the terrorist
University of Reading, Birkbeck, University of London and Royal Sandhurst Military Academy

Birkbeck, University of London, Department of History of Art and Screen Media, 43-46 Gordon Square, London, WC1 0HD

Conference - ' The Blue Rider - Centenary Symposium'

25-26 November 2011
Starr Auditorium, Tate Modern

Event - AS/A2-level History of Art study days at the Tower of London and the National Gallery

 Dates available: December 7th 2011, January 11th 2012 , January 18th 2012, March 21st 2012, March 29th 2012
10:30am -3:30pm
Morning session at Tower of London
Afternoon at National Gallery
Tickets £10 per student

Call for Papers - 'Alice Culture: The Endurance of Wonderland'

Postgraduate Research Forum, Tate Liverpool
Saturday 19th November 2011, 10am- 1pm

Call for Papers - 'Art, Agency, Empire: India in Global Contexts'

Saturday, February 11, 2012
Graduate Student Symposium
Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut

Conference - 'At Cross Purposes? When Art History Meets Design History'

Saturday 22 October 2011
10.00 – 18.10, Kenneth Clark Lecture Theatre, (with registration from 9.30)
The Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 0RN

Exhibition - Word & Image: Early Modern Treasures at UCL

15 September – 16 December 2011

Art History in the Pub - Dr Hannah Williams (Oxford) on The Violent Suicide of François Lemoyne: An 18th-Century Art History Mystery

As part of the AAH's commitment to bringing the best in cutting-edge art-historical research to a wider community, we are pleased to be able to announce a hopefully-regular "Art History in the Pub" series of talks, lectures and events.

Our talks present a selection of the wide vareity of topics, periods, methods and apporaches common in art historical study, and are aimed at a generalist audience.

AHitP is held at:

The Monarch
40-42 Chalk Farm Road
Greater London NW1 8BG
Free to attend.

Next Event

Monday 26th September 2011, 7.30pm - Dr Hannah Williams (Oxford) on The Violent Suicide of François Lemoyne: An 18th-Century Art History Mystery

Paris, 4 June 1737: the celebrated artist François Lemoyne commits suicide. It started as an ordinary day. Lemoyne had been to his studio to give a lesson to his students and taken a meal with his cousin. But then events took a macabre turn. Lemoyne retired to his bedroom, carefully locked the door, took up his sword, and proceeded to inflict upon his body multiple fatal stab wounds, before dropping to the floor and dying in a pool of blood.

Lemoyne’s death shocked and horrified his family and colleagues, and it has since presented something of a mystery for art historians. Why should this incredibly successful artist – first painter to Louis XV – have wanted to kill himself only months after completing what is now considered his magnum opus: the ceiling of the Apotheosis of Hercules at the Château de Versailles? Was it over money? Professional jealousy? A madness induced by lack of recognition? Could it have been murder? Or if it really was suicide, then how did Lemoyne complete his gruesome task?

With most of the clues now lost deep in the past, some art-historical sleuthing is necessary in order to retrieve the traces. In this paper, I attempt to solve these perplexing mysteries through a forensic and art-historical analysis of the object responsible: Lemoyne’s sword. Using police reports, autopsies, and witness statements, I piece together the final hours of Lemoyne’s life and offer a material reconstruction of the now lost fatal weapon, exploring what Lemoyne’s sword looked like, what he did with it, and what it meant to him. Drawn from a larger study investigating what artists’ personal possessions reveal about their everyday lives, this case explores the limits and possibilities of object-biography, and presents an exercise in recovering the material history of an object when that object no longer materially exists.

Can art history solve the crime? Come along and find out!

Biography: Hannah Williams is a Junior Research Fellow in Art History at St John’s College, Oxford. A specialist in 17th- and 18th-century French art, Hannah completed her PhD at the Courtauld Institute of Art in 2010 and previously held a doctoral fellowship at the Centre Allemand d’Histoire de l’Art in Paris. She is currently writing a book on artists’ portraits and self-portraits entitled Face-to-Face with the Académie Royale: An Ethnography in Portraiture, which combines art-historical and anthropological approaches to investigate the culture of an early modern community of artists. Hannah is also researching a post-doctoral project – Painters and Parish Life – which traces the local social networks of artists in 18th-century Paris through a study of parish churches and religious art. With Katie Scott, she is writing a book on Artists’ Things, which offers an alternative guide to the material culture of 18th-century French artists through close studies of their personal possessions.
 

Directions & Details

The Monarch, Camden 40-42 Chalk Farm Road Camden NW1 8BG, http://www.monarchbar.com/events/

Telephone: 020 74822054

Email: info@monarchbar.com

Getting there

From Chalk Farm tube: Turn left out of the station and cross Chalk Farm Road at the lights. The pub is about five minutes walk down the road on the left.
From Camden Town: Take the Camden High Street exit and turn right. Head up the street past Camden Lock and under the rail bridge and proceed up Chalk Farm Road. The pub is a couple minutes walk from the bridge on the right.

By tube: Chalk Farm station (450m) – zone 2 / Camden Town station (530m) – zone 2

By train: Kentish Town West station (460m) / Camden Road station (550m)

By bus: 24 (24hrs), 27 (24hrs), 31, 168, N5, N28, N31 – click here for a local bus map.

Google Map