Drawing in the World: Madeleine Basseporte at the Jardin du roi
Charged with representing the content of the royal botanical garden by Louis XV–the first woman ever to work for the king in such capacity–Madeleine Françoise Basseporte (1701-1780) provided drawings of plants for the exclusive collection known as the vélins du Roi (the Royal Vellums). Consisting of ca 330 sheets, this corpus of images is fascinating both in its particular character and in its broader implications. Looking closely at a selection of Basseporte’s works, this talk explores how the artist’s representational strategies and technical procedures contributed to the production of a particular–heterodox–vision of the vegetal realm. Raising a broader question of the artist’s role in the production of knowledge, Basseporte’s output invites us to consider how the royal vellums in their material specificity served as instruments of an “epistemology of the eye.” A related question is how the Jardin du roi as the locus of Basseporte’s artistic activity contributed to defining the character of her work. At once a physical, discursive, and political space, the Jardin may be seen as a “world” onto itself, a separate realm defined by the emergent natural science but also by the global network of exchanges linked to science, trade, and colonial conquest. In what way was the artist’s depiction of plants implicated in this global context? What was it like to be drawing in this “world”? Last but not least, Basseporte’s practice offers us an opportunity to revisit the fraught notion of the “woman artist.” Focusing on Basseporte’s authorial strategies, this talk will consider the role of the medium in defining the parameters of female creativity in the 18th century. What might attending to the materiality of the medium bring to our understanding of the female artists’ professional functioning in early modernity?
Biography
Ewa Lajer-Burcharth is William Dorr Boardman Professor of Fine Arts at Harvard University. She specializes in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French art and has also written extensively on contemporary art. Her books include Necklines: The Art of Jacques-Louis David after the Terror (Yale University Press, 1999; Ebook A&AePortal, 2022), Chardin Material (Sternberg Press, 2011), and The Painter’s Touch: Boucher Chardin Fragonard (Princeton University Press, 2018; paperback ed., 2022). She also co-authored Interiors and Interiority, (De Gruyter, 2015); Painting Beyond Itself: A Medium in the Post-Medium Condition (Sternberg Press, 2016), and Drawing: The Invention of the Modern Medium (Harvard Art Museums, 2017; Ebook A&Ae Portal, 2018). She is currently working on a book project on 18th-century drawing titled Drawing in The World.
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