Creole Secrets: Ingres, Chassériau, and Joseph

In 1836, Ingres orchestrated an artistic encounter between two Creoles, the painter Théodore Chassériau and the model Joseph, both born in Haiti. Without knowing Ingres’s intended subject, the two Creoles enacted a colonial mise-en-scène, including its inequitable power relations, inside the painter’s Parisian studio. In 1838, the teenage painter finally completed Étude de nègre (Étude d’après le modèle Joseph).

Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby  is Professor of Art History at the University of California, Berkeley. She specializes in 18th- through early 20th-century French and American art and visual and material culture, particularly in relation to the politics of race and colonialism. Her books include Extremities. Painting Empire in Post-Revolutionary France (2002); Colossal. Engineering the Suez Canal, Statue of Liberty, Eiffel Tower and Panama Canal. Transcontinental Ambition in France and the United States in the Long Nineteenth Century (2012); and Enduring Truths. Sojourner's Shadows and Substance (University of Chicago Press, 2015). Her forthcoming lecture at Angewandte will focus on research from her current book-in-progress, Creole Looking. Portraying France’s Foreign Relations in the Nineteenth Century.