Acknowledgments

Grigsby, Darcy Grimaldo

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Acknowledgments

Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby

Extremities: Painting Empire in Post-Revolutionary France

~To name those who have contributed in significant ways to this book is to be embarrassed by my extraordinary riches. My husband, Todd Olson, has had the greatest impact on its argument; his creative thinking and unflagging enthusiasm for the project continually informed its development. The generosity and originality of his conversation were invaluable to the book...

Author

Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby

PublisherYale University Press

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-20654

Acknowledgments

To name those who have contributed in significant ways to this book is to be embarrassed by my extraordinary riches. My husband, Todd Olson, has had the greatest impact on its argument; his creative thinking and unflagging enthusiasm for the project continually informed its development. The generosity and originality of his conversation were invaluable to the book you read. I am blessed to have an insightful and loving interlocutor and I thank him. My work on the School of David and the art of the Napoleonic Empire began in doctoral study with Thomas Crow, whose exceptionally lucid thinking and scholarship provided the rigorous foundation for my inquiry. This book amply demonstrates the centrality of his thought to my own. The inordinate support and kindness of Joel Isaacson and Pat Simons made our intellectual exchange productive and the basis of enduring friendship. David Bien and William H. Sewell, Jr. importantly contributed, along with Thomas Crow, to my undying fascination with the French Revolution. Only Chapter Two of this book stems directly from my dissertation. The majority was developed in the last five years while teaching at the University of California at Berkeley. My colleagues, especially T. J. Clark and Anne Wagner, have contributed significantly to this book as inspiring models of the best in scholarship, as alert attendees at my lectures, as incisive readers of preliminary versions, and as encouraging mentors and friends. I am grateful that T. J. Clark, Joel Isaacson, Michael Rogin, Jeannene Przybylski, Margaret Waller, Michael Fahy, and Huey Copeland read versions of some or all chapters and offered insightful criticisms. Maureen Beck integrated my past with my present by attending my local lectures. What I have described here is not only an exceptional community of creative thinkers and kind persons but an audience to whom I could speak. This book was imaginable only because I knew they would listen.

Many other people and institutions have contributed to the completion of this book. I thank Catherine Leclerc at the Bibliothèque Durzy in Montargis for her warm support and shared fascination with Julie Candeille; Bernard Gainot, professor of history at the Université de Paris-I, for directing me to the invaluable archive of Joseph Boisson’s papers, including letters by Belley; and Sylvain Bellenger, former curator of the Musée Girodet in Montargis, for important leads, including access years ago to Girodet’s oil sketch for the Revolt of Cairo. Without Madame Elisabeth Molle at the Service de la Réunion des Musées Nationaux, Régis Michel, Curator of Drawings at the Louvre, Jessica Dandona and Katie Hornstein, I would have been at a loss locating artworks, especially those in private collections. Francesca Rose, my liaison and friend in Paris, assisted me with research on numerous occasions. Carol and Tom Rose magnanimously shared their homes in France, making research there possible. The generosity of Carl and Katherine Olson kept our family afloat during difficult times. Trish Reed and Jack Rosenberg have made so much possible. Important too was research conducted at the Menil Foundation’s Black Image Information Base at Harvard University and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. The American Academy in Rome, where my husband was a Fellow, provided me with their salone and cortile in which to write; the special community there with daily support. The ethnomusicologist Rebecca Sager translated Creole. Laurent Dubois shared my passion for the history of Haiti.

Graduate students who participated in my seminars at Berkeley continually stimulated and challenged my thinking. I am indebted also to many graduate researchers. I relied upon the goodwill and efficiency of Marnin Young throughout my sabbatical year. One summer’s research conducted by Heather MacDonald compiled key primary sources, above all salon criticism, upon which I continually depended. In addition, I thank researchers Amy Freund, Linda Kim, Katherine Kuenzli, John Tain, John Zarobell, and teaching assistants Jennifer Bethke, Kevin Chua, and Huey Copeland, all of whose labor and thinking contributed to this book. Kate Bonin provided invaluable advice regarding my French translations. I thank also the undergraduates who over the last five years loyally, enthusiastically, and skeptically undertook this endeavor with me, especially research assistants Megan Cantley-Bishop, Kim Chambers, and Katie Hornstein.

Aspects of this book’s argument were presented as guest lectures at Southern Methodist University, the State University of New York at Stony Brook, Rice University, the University of British Columbia, the American Academy in Rome, Trinity University, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the University of Southern California, the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and the French Department, Morrison Library, and Townsend Center at Berkeley. Related papers were also delivered at conferences of the College Art Association, the Middle East Studies Association of North America, and the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. I thank the members of these audiences as well as those who organized the lectures or served as their respondents, especially Margaret Waller, Deborah Harter, James Henry Rubin, Maureen Ryan, Serge Guilbaut, Timothy Hampton, John Hutton, Hollis Clayson, David O’Brien, and Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer. I would like to thank also James Herbert, James Henry Rubin, Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, and Stephen Eisenman for reading this book’s manuscript for various presses and for making insightful suggestions. I thank Michael Fried and Dian Kriz for reading it as well.

Chapter Two was published as “Rumor, Contagion, and Colonization in Gros’s Plague-Stricken of Jaffa (1804),” Representations 51, Summer 1995, pp. 1–61. Chapter Three began as a Morrison Library Inaugural Lecture and publication, March 1996: “Mamelukes in Paris: Fashionable Trophies of Failed Napoleonic Conquest.” An abbreviated version of Chapter Five was published as “Whose colour was not black nor white nor grey,/ But an extraneous mixture, which no pen/ Can trace, although perhaps the pencil may”: Aspasie and Delacroix’s Massacres of Chios,” in Art History 22, no. 5, December 1999, pp. 676–704.

I have been fortunate to receive extensive financial support both at the postdoctoral and predoctoral levels for which I am grateful. Funding for the book project was provided by a J. Paul Getty Postdoctoral Fellowship, a University of California President’s Research Fellowship in the Humanities, a Heilman Family Faculty Fund Award, and Junior Faculty Research Grants. Chapter Two, which originated as part of my dissertation on Napoleonic art, was supported by a Samuel H. Kress Two-Year Institutional Fellowship, a Samuel H. Kress Dissertation Fellowship, a Social Science Research Council Doctoral Fellowship, a Fulbright Full Grant, and a Lurcy Fellowship. The predoctoral fellowships made possible the research that serves as the foundation for this project.

Gillian Malpass at Yale University Press has made this manuscript into the beautiful book I have always wished for. I thank her for her largeness of vision and unflagging commitment; she shepherded a novice through every stage with care and patience. I am indebted as well to copy-editor Katharine Ridler.

I thank also friends and family without whose support of many kinds this book could not have been completed: Lynne Grigsby Standfill, Trish Reed, Maureen Beck, Carl and Katherine Olson, Peter Walters, Jack Rosenberg, Stephen Schachter, Lester Standfill, Janet Leigh, Michael Fahy, Anna Seidler, Helen Isaacson, Michele Amrich, Roger Hankins, Michael Miller, Timiza Wagner, David and Sarah Sheidlower, and my mother’s family, especially Neila Rouse, Jorge Bain, Rina Newell, and – too far away – Danilo Newell. Carl Olson’s sweetness is keenly missed. It is unimaginable to me that Michael Rogin will not see this book; he was one of the persons to whom I wrote. I wish Stefan Germer were here as well. My daughter, Gregoria, has sustained me at every turn. She has listened to endless talk (and talks) which she calls – shorthand “Géricault! Géricault!” and I thank her for her irreverent humor as well as inordinate patience.

I dedicate this book to the memory of my radiant mother. Grief over her loss determined my writing about Jaffa. So too did the absence of the nineteen-year-old U.S. soldier who was my father. My mother’s life inspired the rest, including the pleasure in hard work. Grief, absence, inspiration, pleasure, and work are this book’s past. I give it now to Todd and our beloved children, Gregoria and Wilgens Pierre.

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