University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

The image of art spoliation in France, 1796–1830

Karrels, Nancy Caron

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/115692

Description

Title
The image of art spoliation in France, 1796–1830
Author(s)
Karrels, Nancy Caron
Issue Date
2022-04-15
Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)
O'Brien, David
Doctoral Committee Chair(s)
O'Brien, David
Committee Member(s)
  • Vazquez, Oscar
  • Crowston, Clare
  • Rosenthal, Lisa
  • Warren, Maureen
Department of Study
Art & Design
Discipline
Art History
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Keyword(s)
  • plunder
  • loot
  • pillage
  • France
  • First Empire
  • revolution
  • propaganda
  • museum
  • Louvre
  • Napoleon
  • Denon
  • drawing
  • painting
  • engraving
  • porcelain
  • medal
  • recueil
  • visual culture
  • material culture
  • cultural property.
Abstract
This dissertation examines spoliation imagery created by French artists between 1796 and 1830 around France’s systematic plunder of Europe’s art treasures during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. It argues that concerns over memory and legacy guided many artistic mediations of art pillage and that these blended with other ideas, such as emergent understandings of property rights, to construct a shifting and complex body of art about art looting. Although this genre of illustration never rivalled battle scenes or imperial celebrations as a dominant subject in official art, depictions of the art confiscations and the Louvre Museum’s enrichment proliferated in state propaganda during this period and appeared in both commercial art and art produced for personal consumption. By exploring the ways artists and their patrons recorded, celebrated, and commemorated the capture and transfer of cultural property, this study aims to discern the attitudes and responses of contemporary French artists and arts administrators—the community most directly touched by the spoliations—toward the “cultural conquests” and considers how political imperatives and personal priorities may have driven these sentiments. This project studies works in various media, including painting and drawing, copperplate and woodcut engraving, bronze medals, and porcelain. It explores the production of several artists, including Bertrand Andrieu, Antoine Béranger, Jean Duplessis-Bertaux, François Gérard, Antoine-Jean Gros, Jean-Baptiste Mauzaisse, and Benjamin Zix. Where other valuable analyses of the French pillage of Europe have employed select spoliation images to illustrate textual records of plunder, this study prioritizes illustrated works to illuminate gaps in knowledge where textual sources fall silent. For current-day viewers, the corpus of images in this study offers an important reference for debating the continued presence of plundered cultural property in art museums and the role of artists as witnesses to cultural transitions.
Graduation Semester
2022-05
Type of Resource
Thesis
Copyright and License Information
Copyright 2022 Nancy Karrels

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