Thesis advisor: Ourida Mostefai / This thesis addresses the role of dress in the blurring of social class lines in pre-revolutionary France. The Ancien Régime had a set code for costume, in accordance with rank and birth. I outline this particular order, and the resulting disorder from this social structure through factual evidence and literary examples. The second part will discuss the creation and practice of fashion in the 18th century, leading up to the Estates General of 1789. This building significance of appearance in France made dress both a political and social tool that became incredibly useful during the French Revolution. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Romance Languages and Literature. / Discipline: College Honors Program.

This dissertation examines the translation of paintings and drawings by François Boucher (1703–1770) into luxury media. Eighteenth-century collectors expended small fortunes on precious objects that reproduced Boucher’s work: cameos, intaglios, enamel-painted porcelain vessels, gold boxes, biscuit porcelain figurines, wool and silk tapestries, and furniture upholstery. Existing studies of eighteenth-century reproduction have tended to focus on innovations in printmaking that enabled the production of inexpensive and extremely faithful facsimiles of works of art. Luxury reproductions, by contrast, were expensive, scarce, and materially assertive, often calling attention to their mediums, and to the act of mediation itself. Through an investigation of the morphological, material, and temporal stakes of these intermedial translations, I show that luxury copies were not derivative substitutes for absent originals, but rather were generative tools of social, artistic, and political identity construction. A central figure in this story is the royal mistress Madame de Pompadour (1721–1764), who was an avid collector of Boucher’s work (and of reproductions after his work), and who reproduced his cameos and intaglios in a limited-edition set of engravings. Through her engravings and decorative installations, Pompadour demonstrated a keen interest in the material processes of transmission and the agency of media. I examine Pompadour’s work and patronage in relation to her political identity as a mediator between the court and the king. Boucher was the perfect collaborator in Pompadour’s project; the material processes of intermedial translation often became the very subject of his work. Boucher’s and Pompadour’s deep investment in the materiality of mediation demands that we revise our understanding of the Rococo “unity of the arts,” which too often is attributed to a dematerialized mobility.

My dissertation examines visual representations of children and childhood in French art from the 1750s until the first decades of the nineteenth century. This period in France is distinct because of the sweeping social and political changes with which images of children and childhood were in dialogue, including the redefinition of bourgeois familial relationships, new medical discoveries that influenced how artists interpreted the human mind and body, the chaos of the French Revolution, and the rise of Napoleon and his codification of the laws of nature. By 1750, Enlightenment thinkers and social reformers viewed the education, nurturing, and protection of innocent children as among the fundamental moral acts that defined humanity. Childhood, once considered insignificant, became a special period of human development that women were naturally suited to cultivate. Amidst the corruption of the Ancien régime, the violence of the French Revolution, and the instability of the state, children were unthreatening emblems of social regeneration and hope. Throughout my dissertation, I explore how the complex written and visual language of nature informed artists’ conceptions of children and childhood during the long eighteenth century. Opposing themes of nature’s wildness, containment, wholesomeness, and mysteriousness in different forms paralleled discourses on children and child-rearing. Prominent eighteenth-century artists like Chardin, Boucher, Fragonard, Greuze, Vigée Lebrun, Marguerite Gérard, and others analyzed contemporary scientific, philosophical, artistic, and pedagogical movements to depict children naturally. Even when Romantic artists like Géricault or Prud’hon imagined nature as a dangerous or mystical entity, the emphasis on the unique truthfulness of a child’s character continued to be a subject of great interest, especially when the scientific community recognized child psychology and pediatrics as their own fields of medical study in the early nineteenth century. Compared to studies that have broadly surveyed the ideologies of childhood as reflected in art, my dissertation investigates the socio-historical contexts in which representations of children were commissioned, produced, and displayed. Why did revolutionary events, artists, and patrons appropriate images of the enlightened child? I propose that representations of children from this period offer indisputable symbolic value: they functioned emblematically to advance the morality of a woman’s reputation, or to philosophically communicate an idea about the state of French society during key moments of social and political upheaval. Through a study of images of pastoral children for Madame de Pompadour, representations of bourgeois children with pets, portrayals of the royal children during the French Revolution, and Romantic depictions of children in portraiture, my dissertation traces the socio-historical implications of the representations of children and childhood to make way for new interpretations of artworks.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Montana, 2008. / Title from title screen. Description based on contents viewed Aug. 25, 2008. Includes bibliographical references (p. 46-49).

No / Munro Price has meticulously researched the mood, atmosphere and personalities behind the palace walls. At the heart of this research is a cache of letters that sheds new light on the lives of the royals, as the monarchy was gradually stripped of its power and revolutionary fervour called for their execution. The central character in this new evidence is the Baron de Breteuil, Louis's ambassador in exile, who orchestrated doomed escape plans and co-ordinated the international response to the revolution.This new book reassesses a perennially interesting period of history and will shed fresh insight into one of the real tuning points in European history

In this dissertation I analyse and contextualise stereotypical notions associated with the concept of home, and what that constitutes, in the work of South African artists Antoinette Murdoch, Bronwen Findlay, Doreen Southwood and Penelope Siopis, each of whom displays a different perspective of the concept in their artwork. I further consider how these selected South African artists engage with the dichotomies surrounding issues of home and the gendered position assigned to women in this area. I address the strategies the selected artists use in bringing the realm of the private sphere into the public arena and how they transgress the boundaries of private and public spaces. In addition I consider how concepts of home are reflected in my own work and how they are informed by a feminist perspective. The choice of white female artists as the subject of this research is a conscious one, in that I wish to avoid an investigation into cross-cultural gendered subjectivities which will inevitably become entangled with questions of race, politics and culture. As western feminist thought often tends to ignore the specific experiences of ethnic groups located outside western cultural experience, my focus on artists whose context is in part shared by my own is intended to provide an insider perspective. In the context of this research, 'home' is defined as a traditionally acknowledged place where woman is identified in relation to domesticity and the family unit. The term 'home' is therefore partly applicable to a type of domestic environment regardless of its geographic and cultural associations. Home has been defined as a 'group of persons sharing a home or living space (whereas) most households consist of one person living alone, a nuclear family, an extended family or a group of unrelated people' (Scott and Marshall 2005:276). The home is regarded as a place of security where the most intimate of relationships takes place, but it is also an arena of complex human relationships associated with domestic, family, personal and cultural identity. The home is further regarded as a private space and as being somewhat inaccessible, as opposed to the public domain which is open to scrutiny. The home houses a corridor of emotion, however, and may often become a place of entrophy. A subtle shifting and subverting of the conventions which society places upon women and men to conform to particular behavioural constructs will be deconstructed to reveal the concept of home as a site where the boundaries between reality and illusion become blurred. My own artistic practice is concerned with the deconstruction of the home as an idealised space and the façade that often conceals a dystopian reality that lurks beneath such idealisation. I share assumed cultural and class values with the selected artists and will critique the subject from a personal perspective, in part as a self-narrative. Within the context of this research, the term 'middle class' is defined as 'the class of society between the upper and working classes, including business and professional people' (The Oxford English Dictionary 1994:509). / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2011.

La tesi vuole evidenziare il carattere continuativo che l’influenza francese ha esercitato sulla moda curiale nel XVIII, fino allo scoppiare delle Rivoluzione. I primi tre capitoli, sono necessari per comprendere la nascita di questa fortuna. Lo scontro tra corona francese e corona spagnola si è caratterizzato nel XVII secolo anche come scontro di codici vestimentari. Il perdurare delle “divise” di corte maschile e femminile nel XVIII perfezionate durante la seconda metà del regno di Luigi XIV è funzionale al mantenimento del ruolo guida: riconoscendo la necessità di uniformarsi agli abiti prescritti dal cerimoniale francese, le corti si appropriano non solo di un codice vestimentario, ma di una particolare immagine della monarchia. Il monopolio francese sulla moda si basa su un’autorità che deriva innanzitutto da quella conseguita nel secolo precedente. Alla fine del Settecento il rifiuto per gli abiti strettamente di corte che coincide con la creazione di alternative che possano soddisfare l’esigenza dell’apparire curiale segue una matrice quasi strettamente femminile: capacità della corte francese è quelle di elaborare spunti provenienti da altre culture e modificarle in chiave nazionale. / The thesis wants to focus on the continuity of the French influence on the evolution of European fashion during the eighteenth century to the Revolution. The first three chapters are indispensable to understand the origin of this success. The fight between the French and the Spanish court during the sixteenth century was also a fight for the supremacy of their own fashion style. The persistence in the eighteenth century of the court dress code for man and women that was elaborated during the reign of Louis XIV was functional to the maintenance of the guide role of the French court in Europe. At the end of the century, the refusal of strictly court dresses for new kind of clothes is peculiar of the women living at the court, but the French court has the ability to invent new fashions using ideas coming from other countries.

Ce mémoire rend compte d'un long processus qui trouve son origine dans le travail du théâtre : décors, costumes, textes, voix, acteurs et représentations, processus qui puise dans les caprices, les anecdotes, les vérités et les mensonges de la grande histoire. Il fait état de la recherche qui a mené à la réalisation d'une vidéo mettant en scène le lent déshabillage d'un personnage célèbre, Marie-Antoinette d'Autriche, et à l'exposition recontextualisant les costumes et les accessoires utilisés pendant le tournage. En plus de mettre Marie-Antoinette en relation avec sa mère, Marie-Thérèse de Habsbourg, ce récit vidéographique a fait appel à d'autres personnages qui portent le récit: les Archivistes, les Bornes et les Africaines. À travers ces personnages secondaires, le corps du personnage-actrice Marie-Antoinette, surexploité par la culture populaire, est décortiqué, classifié, classé, reclassé et conceptualisé avant d'être utilisé comme point d'ancrage d'une création théâtrale. Dans la construction de cette histoire, le costume, réel et conceptuel, a servi de trame au texte, qui a ensuite guidé la gestuelle de l'actrice une fois le costume endossé. À travers un effeuillage menant au corps de l'actrice, le présent texte fait, couche après couche, état de cette réflexion sur le corps mis en scène et sur les capacités et limites de celui-ci à raconter une expérience sensible. ______________________________________________________________________________ MOTS-CLÉS DE L’AUTEUR : apparence, image, corps, vêtement, peinture, vidéo, théâtre, costume, jeu.

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