The 19th Annual Graduate Student Symposium on March 26–27 virtually presented the work of ten young international and national scholars. Co-sponsors of the symposium, the Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art and the Dahesh Museum of Art, are pleased to announce the recipients of the 2022 Dahesh Museum of Art Prize, a gift from the Mervat Zahid Cultural Foundation. The prize honors especially distinguished presentations at the annual graduate student symposium. This year two individuals will receive the award.
Charlotte Bonaparte (1802–1839) (drawing) and Marcellin Jobard (1792–1861) (print), View of the North River [Hudson River], from Clermont, New York (1824)
Lithograph, New York, New York Public Library
Thomas Busciglio-Ritter for his presentation “From Brussels to Point Breeze: Charlotte Bonaparte and the American Landscape, 1821–1825,” in which he examined the production of landscape images by Charlotte Bonaparte during her American residence, 1821–1824. Her involvement with networks of transatlantic lithographers and painters resulted in the publication of her portfolio of sketches: Picturesque Views of America, one of the first to widely circulate views of U.S. scenery in print to European audiences.
Thomas Busciglio-Ritter is the Richard & Mary Holland Assistant Curator of American Western Art at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, as well as a doctoral candidate at the University of Delaware. A scholar from France, he previously received an MA from the École du Louvre. His research covers 19th-century landscape art, racial relations, environmental issues, and artistic circulations between Europe and the United States. He was awarded an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Curatorial Fellowship at the University of Delaware and a 2021 Terra Foundation Research Travel Grant. His research has been published in Revue de l’Art, Oxford Journal of the History of Collections, Panorama, and Early American Studies. An essay will be published in the forthcoming 2022 Musée d’Orsay exhibition catalog Rosa Bonheur.
Photograph of Henry Hobson Richardson, Allegheny County Courthouse and Jail, Pittsburgh, c. 1890. Carnegie Museum of Art Collection of Photographs.
Carter Jackson for his presentation “Turbulent Politics and a Stage for Democracy: Government and Governmentality in the Allegheny County Courthouse,” in which he explored the role of architecture during moments of political unrest. He examined how Henry Hobson Richardson’s design for the Allegheny County Courthouse, completed in 1888, mediated a fraught relationship between citizens and their government in late 19th-century Pittsburgh.
Carter Jackson is a doctoral student at Boston University. His research focuses on issues related to 19th-century architecture, nationalism, and subjectivity in Britain and the United States. He received his undergraduate degree in architecture and worked as a designer in professional practice before completing his MA in the History of Art at the University of York, where he earned distinction for his thesis, “An Anglo-Continental Exchange: Harlaxton Manor and Its Decorative Art.” He has been a Research Intern at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the MIT Museum, and Historic New England.
At a future date, both scholars will present and discuss their work at an AHNCA/Dahesh Virtual Salon.
The symposium also included papers by the following graduate students:
Gabriel Hubmann, University of Basel, “Allegory and Caricature in Antoine-Jean Gros’s Napoleon Visiting the Plague-Stricken of Jaffa (1804).”
Gros’s history painting has given rise to several questions still relevant today. One detail in particular has puzzled scholars: the dramatic size difference between Napoleon and the sick soldiers. Hubmann argues that this detail can be interpreted as a kind of allegory, both drawing from and directed against caricatures critical of Napoleon.
Teresa Mocharitsch, University of Graz and Museumsakademie Joanneum, “Vae Victoribus: Charles Landelle’s Velleda and the Franco-Prussian War.”
With his painting Velleda (1870), Charles Landelle adapted the Germanic seeress Veleda for the French narrative of the Franco-Prussian War. Mocharitsch situates the picture in the iconography of Veleda, in the painter’s oeuvre, and in the visual culture of this armed conflict in order to deepen our understanding of the resonance of historical reception.
Glynnis Napier Stevenson, University College London and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, “‘In the West of Traditions, 1793 Was Yesterday’: Royalism at the 1889 Decennial Exposition.”
Julien Le Blant’s 1883 painting The Execution of Charette [1796] exemplifies compromises made at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1889 to appeal to right-wing voters during a crucial election year. One hundred years after the storming of the Bastille, the governing centrists used the Exposition to extend an olive branch to the politics of royalist grievance.
Katie Loney, University of Pittsburgh and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Making a Global Market for Indian Art: Lockwood de Forest and The Ahmedabad Wood Carving Company.”
Loney traces the Ahmedabad Wood Carving Company’s artistic furnishings and ornamental work through the late 19th-century global art market, identifying systems of circulation, exchange, and display in which the AWCC helped establish a canon of Indian applied arts grounded in Western judgments and tastes as well as imperial control through trade.
Lea C. Stephenson, University of Delaware, “Dressing Up Egypt: Whiteness and the Allure of Egyptomania, 1870–1920.”
A late 19th-century wave of Egyptomania included American and British artists and collectors interpreting Egypt as a setting for sensuous escapism. Elite, white women in the United States and Britain wore Egyptian-inspired dresses and jewels—in portraits and in life. Stephenson examines this haptic and embodied act of performing race when dressing up as “Egyptian.”
Remi Poindexter, City University of New York, “Plantation Pastorales: Jenny Prinssay’s Caribbean Landscapes and the Salon of 1814.”
In 1814, two works depicting the French Caribbean were shown in the Paris Salon, made by an enigmatic artist named Jenny Prinnsay (née Bouscaren) who had previously shown at the Salon of 1801. Poindexter discusses Prinssay’s View of a Bay on the Island of Martinique as it relates to early 19th-century depictions of the French colony and the Caribbean as a whole.
Gabriela Torres, University of Lisbon. “Light and Shadow: The Photography of Louis Igout and Its Relation to Nineteenth-Century Academic Figure Drawing”
Torres explores a photography album by Louis Igout (1837–1881), created to serve as an auxiliary aid for artists. Through it, she demonstrates the growing influence of photography in the creation of new graphic expressions, illustrating this with charcoal drawings by Portuguese students from the Paris École des Beaux-Arts, the Académie Julien and the Académie Delécluse.
Ivana Dizdar, University of Toronto and The National Gallery of Canada, “Embracing the North: Panoramic Visions of Global Commerce in Triumphal France (1889).”
Unveiled at the Paris Bourse de Commerce in 1889, the vast panoramic mural Triumphal France represents trade between France and the world. Curiously, one of the mural’s four regional sections depicts the Polar North. Exploring this inclusion, Dizdar examines how the Arctic figured in French 19th-century visual culture and geopolitics.
2022 Jury: Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, J. David Farmer, Marilyn Satin Kushner, Nancy Locke, Patricia Mainardi. Technical Director: Kaylee Alexander.